"The sahib knows that much? And am I to quell the flames?" asked
Yasmini.
She neither sat nor lay on the divan. She was curled on it, leaning on an elbow, like an imp from another world.
"Who owns that house?" asked Kirby, since he could think of nothing else to ask.
"That is the House-of-the-Eight-Half—brothers," said Yasmini. "He who built it had eight wives, and a son by each. That was ages ago, and the descendants of the eight half-brothers are all at law about the ownership. There are many stories told about that house."
Suddenly she broke into laughter, leaning on her hand and mocking them as Puck mocked mortals. A man could not doubt her. Colonel and adjutant, both men who had seen grim service and both self-possessed as a rule, knew that she could read clean through them, and that from the bottom of her deep, wise soul she was amused.
"I am from the North," she said, "and the North is cold; there is little mercy in the hills, and I was weaned amid them. Yet—would the sahib not better beg of me?"
"How d'ye mean?" asked Kirby, surprised into speaking English.
"Three days ago there came a wind that told me of war—of a world-war, surely not this time stillborn. Two years ago the same wind brought me news of its conception, though the talk of the world was then of universal peace and of horror at a war that was. Now, to-night, this greatest war is loose, born and grown big within three days, but conceived two years ago—Russia, Germany, Austria, France are fighting—is it not so? Am I wrong?"
"I came to ask about Ranjoor Singh," said Colonel Kirby, twisting at his closely cropped mustache.
There was a hint of iron in his voice, and he was obviously not the man to threaten and not fulfil. But she laughed in his face.