'Art not angry with thy father, Azîz?' he asked humbly; but there was no answer. He watched her languid retreat to the hut almost fearfully. 'Lo, she forgets the things I have remembered, and I forget those she remembers, he murmured, before he broke once more into his chant with a quavering voice.

This forgetfulness of the girl's, showing itself so often, was a perpetual wonder to the old man, who never for an instant doubted that his dead daughter had indeed returned to him. 'Nay, but thou knowest beloved!' he would remonstrate against her ignorance. 'Hast not played in the Mori gate, and bought sweetmeats of old Bishno, perched on my shoulder like any tame squirrel?'

'Mayhap, mayhap!' she would answer impatiently. 'I care not. There was a Hindu girl, I remember, who did not weep as the others used to do. Life was a dream, she said. We would forget it soon in another. Mayhap 'tis true and I have forgotten.'

It suited her to deceive the old man. When she had first realised the position, she had been too weak to do more than wonder at it. Then, by degrees, while she still lay helpless, the potter's talk, her own recollections of old Zainub's hints, joined to the extraordinary similarity in those extraordinary eyes, had given her a shrewd guess as the truth. And with it came a fierce savage delight in her inheritance of witchcraft. It meant revenge; revenge and safety. The potter deemed her a ghost from another world; the village folk should think the same. So she hid herself away in the dark hovel, spending the long hot days in dreaming of a time when she could creep out on some moonlit night and frighten the wits out of the world which had wronged her; for her whole nature was jangled and out of tune. She hated everything and everybody, herself included; at least so she told herself as she sat idle, listless, brooding over revenge. It was not difficult for her to avoid observation. To begin with, the village folk were afraid of the potter's eyes at the best of times, and of late strange tales had been told. Finally, Mai Jewun's longed-for son had been born with a distinct thumb-mark, and had died. The only person, in fact, who could have allayed these fears lay shrivelling into a mummy with the heat on the old secret stairs; so Azîzan might have wandered through the village had she chosen without fear of anything save sending all the women into hysterics, and making the men give themselves up as doomed to die. She did not care to wander, however; she cared for nothing save to sit crunched up at the lintel of the hovel door and stare into vacancy until the dawn sent her back to the darkness within.

The potter found her so when he returned from taking the pot back to the Mori gate late in the evening. The fading daylight struggled still with the rising moon, making confused havoc among the shadows, and giving an odd iridescence to the dust-laden air. From without came a barking of dogs, an occasional cry, every now and again a group of bleatings from the goat-pens. All the every-day commonplace sounds of village life; and in the courtyard the same lack of outward novelty. Only an old man with his pugree off eating his supper of millet cakes and water beside a sick girl.

'Ari, beloved, cough not so!' came his tender voice. 'Lo! I will go but now for the sherbet. Dittu was away when I passed his shop. And see, I will seek out the sahib ere he leaves to-morrow and ask for more medicine. It did thee good.'

The girl's breath came faster.

'Leaves? Wherefore?'

'He hath been ill, dear heart, so Chândni says. He goes to the mem sahiba in the hills.'

Azîzan's hand clutched the old man's arm. 'And the pot! what of the pot?'