'As you please, Miss Tweedie; we are your slaves. A mad potter sounds cheerful; he is the man, I suppose, who made that jolly little pot Keene sacrificed to my cousin's greed this morning. When you are as old as I am, my dear fellow, you will really keep the pretty things out of the sight of ladies. I always do, nowadays. There was a little woman at Peshawur, I remember--she had blue eyes--who wheedled----'
'Mrs. Boynton was most welcome to the Ayôdhya pot,' blurted out George hastily.
'Cela va sans dire! It is just because we love to give the pretty things to the pretty creatures that it becomes unwise to let the pretty creatures see the pretty things.'
'Then it is your fault, to begin with,' interrupted Rose hotly.
'Exactly so. I'm sure, Miss Tweedie, you have heard me say a dozen times that we men are to blame for all the weaknesses of women. They are simply the outcome of our likes and dislikes; and they will remain so until there is a perpetual leap-year.'
'For heaven's sake, Keene,' said Dan, laughing, 'lead the way to the potter's or there will be murder done on the King's Highway! Don't mind him, Miss Rose! He "only says it to annoy because he knows it teases." He doesn't really believe anything of the kind.'
Lewis, his eye-glass more aggressive than ever, murmured something under his breath about the inevitable courses of nature, as Rose, with her head held very high, followed George Keene into the potter's yard.
It was a scene strangely at variance with the party entering it. Indeed, old Fuzl Elâhi, who had never before set eyes on an Englishwoman, would have started from his work had not George detained him with reassuring words:
'He tells his yarns best when he is at the wheel,' he explained as he dragged forward a low string stool for Rose. 'And I want you to hear an awfully queer one called "The Wrestlers." You know enough of the language to understand him at any rate.'
'Miss Tweedie is a better scholar than most of us,' remarked Lewis Gordon curtly from the seat he had found beside Dan on a great log of wood; one of those logs so often to be seen in such courtyards--relics, perhaps, of some ineffectual intention of repair long since forgotten. This one might, to all appearance, have fallen where it lay in those bygone days of which the potter told tales, when the now treeless desert had been a swampy jungle on the borders of an inland sea.