'Don't worry. It's best over, for I must have told her. You see we have been engaged for years, and George knew it. If I carry her to your room, Miss Rose, she will be better there. 'Tis the shock, and she was so fond of him, dear heart.'
Lewis Gordon, left alone in the verandah while another man before his very eyes carried off the woman to whom he supposed himself to be engaged, felt that the world had broken loose from its foundations altogether. So that was the explanation! And then a low murmur of moaning from the potter arrested his attention, which, as is so often the case after a shock, had lost its airt and become vagrant.
The old man, still crouched beside the fragments of the Ayôdhya pot, was rocking himself backwards and forwards, and muttering to himself, 'She will be angry; the Mâdr-mihrbân will be angry, and then Azîzan will not sleep.'
Lewis walked up to him and laid his hand reassuringly on the thin, bent shoulders. 'I don't think the Mâdr-mihrbân will be angry. I'm almost sure she won't.' His own words made him smile, until, as he looked at the old man's shifty, bright eyes raised to his doubtfully, he remembered the young sad face which George had painted. 'And Azîzan is asleep,' he said gently; 'she will not wake again.'
As he stooped to gather up the jewels his eyes were dim with unwonted tears--why, he scarcely knew.
When Rose came back ten minutes after, leaving Gwen to Dan's kind consolations, she found Lewis leaning over the railings looking at the rain lilies through his eyeglass as if it had been a microscope. He turned to her with the air of a man who has made up his mind.
'You thought I was engaged to my cousin, Miss Tweedie,' he said. 'So did I. Apparently I was mistaken. So let us set that aside, once and for all, and think over more important matters. There is no lack of other surprises, thank Heaven.'
The semi-cynicism of his words did not sit ill on him, and Rose recognised that he had certainly chosen the most dignified way out of the difficulty. At the same time it left her free, unexpectedly free, to consider the position as an outsider, and all involuntarily, yet naturally enough, her first thought expressed itself in words:
'I wonder what father will say?'
This was too much both for temper and dignity, fortunately, also for humour. He gave her one indignant look, then relaxed into a smile.