"Mr. Forrester thinks he is not. But you can see for yourself," replied her father, returning to his tea and his treasures, "for he is still over in the orderlies' tent. They had such trouble hunting him out of the jungles and persuading him to come here that they said they must keep him overnight, anyhow, in case he was wanted."
An hour or so afterwards, therefore, a yellow-legged constable escorted the goatherd who had answered to the name of Khesroo into the verandah of the Miss-Sahiba's drawing-room tent. It, also, was set wide to the cool of the desert evening, and its easy-chairs and low, flower-decked tables strewn with books and magazines struck a curiously dissonant note from that sounded by the wilderness of sandy waste which on all sides hemmed in the little square of white-winged camp with a certain hungry emptiness.
"He is the man, Jim," said the girl, in an undertone (for her father had come over from office and was seated within, reading the daily papers which the camel-post had just brought). "And yet--he looks different somehow--and so ill, too."
He did look ill, with the languid yet harassed air which follows on malarial fever. The buoyancy of his carriage was replaced by an almost dejected air. Yet it was unmistakably the goatherd they had met the evening before, who, in obedience to a sign, squatted down midway, as it were, between the culture inside the tent and the savagery without it.
"You look as if you had been having fever--have you?" asked the girl abruptly, for her years of authority had made her knowledgeable in such things.
"The malika sahiba says right," replied Khesroo, indifferently. "I have had it much--this long while back."
"And you had it yesterday or the day before?"
"It was yesterday. I was put past by it all day. And yet----" here a vague perplexity came to the dulled yet anxious face as he looked first at the girl, then apologetically at Jim Forrester. "What the Presence said about meeting me is perhaps right after all. Yes! it is right. I did see the Huzoor. I have remembered from the graciousness of the queen-lady and the gold crown of her hair."
The young Englishman frowned angrily. "You work miracles in memory, my dear Queenie," he said, and there was quite an aggrieved tone in his voice as he turned shortly on the speaker. "Why on earth didn't you tell the truth before, then? And the old city? I suppose you remember all about that, too?"
"The old city," echoed Khesroo, doubtfully. "No, Huzoor! What should I know about it beyond what all know--that there was a city, and that it is lost? Such as I know only what the wise tell them----" he paused, and even to his deprecation came a half-resigned self-assertion, "And yet I had more chance than most, seeing that my mother was twice-born."