The young man looked round the familiar scene, every detail of which fitted so closely to memory that no room remained for the seven years' absence. A rush of glad recognition surged to heart and brain, making him stand up and give the Kalma.[[22]]
"I am content, oh, my father!" he cried in ringing tones, as the sonorous echoes died away to silence. "I am content to come back to the old life, to the old duties."
"The sun makes my head ache," said Feroza, rising abruptly, "I will go into the dark and rest."
"Don't go, Feroza! Thou hast not told the Meer about thyself," pleaded Kareema, rising in her turn. "She hath worked so hard," she added petulantly to the young man. "No one is worth it, no one."
The Meer looked from one to the other. "Learning is hard for women," he began. Then something in his wife's face roused the new man in him, making him say in a totally different tone and manner, "I am afraid I hardly understand."
"That is what Kareema says of me," replied Feroza icily.
Her cousin, as she sat down once more to listen, shrugged her shoulders. "And she counted herself as something better than a woman," was her inward comment amid her smiles.
Feroza saw nothing of her husband for the rest of the day. The men's court was crowded with visitors, and she herself had to bear the brunt of many feminine congratulations. Only at sunset, before starting to attend a feast given in his honour, he found time for five minutes' speech with her; but, almost to her relief, he was far too content, far too excited by his own pleasure to be able to distinguish any other feeling in her mind. Yet a momentary hesitation on his part as he was leaving made her heart bound, and a distinct pause brought her to his side with wistful eyes, only to see Kareema nodding and smiling to him from the roof, whither she had gone for fresher air. "What is it?" he asked kindly, though his looks were elsewhere.
"Nothing," she answered, "nothing at all. Go in peace!"
The moon, rising ere the sun set, stole the twilight. So she sat gazing at the hard square outlines of the walls till far on into the night, her mind filled with but one thought. The thought that by and by Ahmed Ali, flushed with content at things which she had taught herself for his sake to despise, would come home to her--to his wife. The little room she had travestied into a pitiful caricature of foreign fashions seemed to mock her foolish hopes, so she crept away to the lattice whence she had had her first glimpse of wisdom. Even on that brilliant night the vestibule itself was dark; but through the door she could see the empty arcades of the men's court surrounding the well where she and her cousins used to play.