The next morning, when the Rajah went to the garden to visit the flower, he found it was gone. Then he was very unhappy, and he questioned the keepers of the garden, but they could tell him nothing about it.
But even when the flower was burned, that was not the end of the young Ranee.
The wind caught up the ashes of the flower and blew them back into the garden, and they fell close beside the wall. From these ashes grew up a mango tree. It grew and grew until its top was higher than the garden walls and could be seen from the road outside the garden. Then upon the very topmost bough there bloomed a flower. In due time the petals of the flower fell, and the mango fruit was seen. The fruit grew larger and larger. Every day it grew, and it shone with a rosy light as though there were a flame within it, and every day the Rajah came and looked at it, and when he looked he was happy, just as he had been when he looked at the golden flower.
The fruit was almost ripe, but no one was allowed to touch it, for it was to be for the Rajah alone.
Now one day the old milk woman who was Surya Bai’s mother was going home with her empty milk cans, and she sat down to rest outside the wall of the Rajah’s garden. She sat near where the mango tree was growing, but it was inside the garden and she was outside. Then the mango bent its top and leaned farther and farther across the wall, and, quite suddenly, the great, rosy mango fell down and into the empty milk can of Surya Bai’s mother.
The old woman was terrified. She thought, “If any one should see this mango in my milk can, they would think I was a thief and had stolen it, and I would be punished.” So she caught up her can and hurried home with it. Then she put it in the corner and heaped up ever so many other empty milk cans on top of it.
She said nothing about what had happened until that evening, when she and her husband and her eldest son were alone together and the other children were in bed, for she had a large family. Then she told them the whole story,—she told how she had sat down to rest in the shade of the wall, and how the mango had fallen into her milk can, and how she had brought it home and had put the can in the corner under all the other milk cans.
“And now do you go and fetch the mango,” said she to her husband, “and we will cut it and have a fine feast.”
The husband went out to where the milk cans had been heaped up and began lifting them down, one after another, until he had come to the last one. Then he gave a great cry.
“You told me a mango was in the milk can,” he cried to his wife, “but here is something very different.”