'Is that the mosque?' she asked dubiously.
George's reply was full of condescension, which it would not have been had he looked on Azîzan in the light of a girl capable, as girls always are, of mischief; for the sketch was accurate to a degree. It ended in an offer of ten rupees for a finished picture of that odd, attractive, yellow-brown face. It was now resting its pointed chin on the tucked-up knees, round which the thin brown arms were clasped; and the smile which lengthened the already long curves of the mouth George set down to sheer greedy delight at an over large bribe, which, to tell truth, he regretted. Half would have been sufficient.
'Then the Huzoor must really think me pretty.'
The words might have been bombs, the sigh of satisfaction accompanying them a thunderclap, from the start they gave to his superiority. So she was nothing more nor less than a girl; rather a pretty girl, too, when she smiled, though not so picturesque as when she was grave.
'I think you will make a pretty picture,' he replied with dignity. 'Come! ten rupees is a lot, you know.'
'I'll sit if the Huzoor thinks me pretty,' persisted Azîzan, now quite grave. And her gravity, as she sat with the reddish purple drapery veiling all save the straight column of her throat and the thin brown hands clasping the Ayôdhya pot, appealed so strongly to George Keene's artistic sense, that he would have perjured himself to say she was beautiful as a houri twenty times over if thereby he could have made her sit to him.
She proved an excellent model; perhaps because she had done little else all her life but sit still, with that grave tired look on her face. So still, so lifeless, that he felt aggrieved when, without a word of warning, she rose and salaamed.
'I must go home now, Huzoor,' she said in answer to his impatient assertion that he had but just begun. 'I will come to-morrow if the Huzoor wishes it.'
'Of course you must come,' he replied angrily, 'if you are to get the ten rupees. Why can't you stay now?'
Azîzan might have said with truth that a hand from the gateway behind the sketcher's back had beckoned to her, but she only smiled mysteriously.