He was still breathless from his swift climb beside Dan's long stride, and, as he straightened himself again, his long supple fingers, busied already about a knotted corner in the cotton shawl folded round him, trembled visibly.
'Lo, I sent it before,' he went on in low excuse; 'but it returned, as all things return at Hodinuggur. Then she was vexed and could not rest. "Send it back! send it back," she cried all night long. Pity of God! what a fever; but now she sleeps sound----' He paused, to fumble closer at the knot.
'You mean Azîzan, your daughter?' suggested Rose softly, while the others stood silent, listening and looking, the whole world seeming to hold nothing for them save this tall girl with her bright, eager face, and that bent old man trying to undo a knot.
'Huzoor--Azîzan!' came the quavering voice. 'I looked for her so often till the Mâdr-mihrbân came. Then I found her with the pot clasped to her breast, but the bad dreams would not let her sleep. "It is not mine; it is hers." It kept her awake always. So when I found her again, lying asleep by the river with it still in her bosom, I said to myself, "I will not set a writing on it, and put it in the box with a slit as I did last time, trusting it to God knows who, after the new fashion. I will take it myself in the old fashion and give it to the Mâdr-mihrbân's own hands, and pray her hold it fast so it return not to wake the child; for she sleeps sound at last in the dust of her father's."'
The knot was undone. The shaking fingers held the Ayôdhya pot for a second, the white glare of the mist shining in a broad blaze of light upon its intense glowing blue. The next it had slipped from the potter's hand and lay in fragments on the ground!
Still fragments of sapphire colour--moving fragments of milky white, rolling hither and thither like drops of dew on a leaf seeking a resting-place for their round lustre.
Pearls!--the Hodinuggur pearls!
And Gwen's voice, with a triumphant ring in it, became articulate above the old man's cry of distress and the low exclamations of the others.
'So Azîzan stole them, after all!'
Rose turned on her sharply. 'Who knows. This much is certain, she has brought them back, and saved George when we could not.'