“Oh, I do feel so perfectly happy!” cried Mabel. “Think of all the horrid doleful things we were saying last night, Flora. And now Georgie is getting on all right, and the baby——”
“And such a baby!” said Flora gravely, contemplating with deep interest the morsel of humanity which was lying in Mabel’s arms, wrapped in a shawl. It was with most unflattering reluctance that Mrs Hardy and Rahah had consented to confide their precious charge to two amateur nurses, however well meaning; but Mabel took a high view of her privileges as an aunt, and the baby had been entrusted to her and Flora for a short time, on condition of their promising faithfully to bring it back if it cried.
“And our men are all safely back, and we have won a victory, and everything is splendid!” Mabel went on. And yet she did not disclose the chief cause of her abounding satisfaction. She was free once more, and she felt that a load had been removed from her mind. But if she told Flora, Flora would think that her plain speaking the night before had brought about this happy result, and ungratefully enough, Mabel did not care that she should think so. “I feel as if I should like to dance,” she broke out. “Do dance, Flora.”
“And shake the dear baby?” asked Flora reproachfully.
“Salaam, Miss Sahib!” said a voice from the doorway, and they turned to see Ismail Bakhsh standing in the semi-darkness of the passage, shaded by the matting curtain. “Is it permitted to the meanest of his slaves to kiss the feet of the Baba Sahib?”
“Oh yes, you can see him,” said Mabel, guessing at the tenor of the request, and she held up the baby. It was not by any means her intention that Ismail Bakhsh should take the child from her arms, but this he did at once.
“Oh, you’ll make him cry!” protested Flora.
“Nay, Miss Sahib, he will know me, that I am the servant of his house. Was I not for ten years Sinjāj Kīlin Sahib’s orderly, going in and out with him?”
“All the same, I don’t quite see how that should make you an authority on babies, my good man,” murmured Flora, and told Mabel Ismail Bakhsh’s qualifications for the post he had usurped. But the baby lay quite quietly in his arms, as though it recognised the force of the ancestral tie.
“The Baba Sahib has the eyes of Nāth Sahib, not of Kīlin Sahib,” was the self-constituted nurse’s next remark, delivered in a tone of keen regret.