"Was it long-shaped, in a blue cover?" asked Afzul, eagerly. "There was no cover, but it was long, like the summons from the courts. Stay! if thy mind be really set on such knowledge there is a friend of my poor Murghub's--one who pleads in the courts--even now resting in his father's village but a space from here. He must know more than thou canst want to hear." So in the cool of the next morning Afzul walked through the barren fields to see the pleader. A keen-faced sallow young man, seemingly glad to escape for the time from patent-leather boots and such like products of civilisation. The Pathan found him squatting over against a _hookah_ and basking in the sunshine like the veriest villager. For all that he was fulfilled with strange knowledge of law and order as administered by the alien, and Afzul sat open-eyed while he discoursed of legacies, and settlements, of the _feme covert_ and the Married Women's Property Act, with a side glance at divorces and permanent alimony--strange topics to be gravely discussed at the gateway of an Indian village through which men were carried to their rest and women to their bridal beds, with scant appeal to anything but custom. It utterly confused Afzul, though it sent him away convinced that the blue envelope must mean the loot of another lover to the _mem-sahib_. "I will wait," he said to himself decisively; "yes, I will wait until she is faithful and goes back to the Major; then, as that pleader fellow says, he will get the money. But if _he_ leaves her and takes his money instead, then I will send her the envelope. That is but fair. God and his Prophet! but their ways are confusing. 'Tis better to steal and fight as we do; it makes the women faithful."