Khôjee, who was already spinning for dear life, set the question by. A great fear was in her old heart, because of the evil portent of the falling drum; but none because of the truth, writ clear on that sleeping figure, that it would never wake again.
So Khâdjee was still writing out the attributes of God, and Noormahal scraping out another dose of the wonderful western medicine from the bottom of a tin of Brand's essence against the wakening that would never come.
'He is more like his grandfather than his father,' remarked the tailors wife as she looked at the child, 'If he had been King, he would have been better than Jehân.'
She made the assertion calmly, and though Aunt Khôjee looked up, doubtful of its ambiguity, no one denied or contradicted it. So the tailor's wife passed out of these four walls, leaving them empty of all things strange.
For the very shadows they threw were familiar. All her life long, Noormahal's big black eyes had watched the purple one of the eastern wall lessen and lessen before the rising of the sun, and the purple one of the western wall grow behind the setting of the sun. Only on the angled screen at the door the shadows were sometimes new; these shadows of some one coming from outside.
There was one on it now; clear, unmistakable. No! not one; there were two! The shadows of two strange women muffled in their veils, coming in as if they had the right to enter.
A quick terror flew to Noormahal's eyes at the sight!
The tailor's wife had not been long in spreading her news.
In an instant Noormahal was on her feet fighting the air wildly with her hands.
'It is not true!' she cried passionately; 'it is not true!' And then the mockery of her own denial, the certainty that it was so, came to her even without a look at the child, and her voice rose piercingly in the mother's dirge--