King was at last brought to consent to the trial of the plan, if a week or two of careful diet and nursing, together with cheerful society and the blessing of hopefulness, should prove to have a beneficial effect on the patient’s general health. It seemed to Georgia that, in view of the state of things in the Palace, each portion of the prescription was more unattainable than the rest; but after two or three days of vain endeavours to instruct the shiftless harem servants in the arts of nursing and of invalid cookery, and to restore tone to the mind of the poor Queen, weakened and saddened as it was by years of sorrow, she found a new ally at her side. Coming into the Queen’s room one day, she saw seated on the divan a tall girl with a fresh English face, blue-eyed and fair-haired, holding a closely-swathed baby in her arms. Although the stranger wore the Ethiopian dress, Georgia would have greeted her at once as a fellow-countrywoman, if she had not turned and stared at her with undisguised interest and pleasure, saying something in Ethiopian to the Queen. Then a great pang of pity seized Georgia’s heart, for she knew that the English girl before her must be Nur Jahan, Jahan Beg’s daughter and Rustam Khan’s wife. Remembering her promise to Nur Jahan’s father, however, Georgia composed her face and took her usual seat beside her patient. The Queen was so much more cheerful this morning, that it was evident she enjoyed the presence of her daughter-in-law and grandson; and after a while, to Georgia’s delight, she brightened visibly at Nur Jahan’s suggestion that, when the operation had been successfully performed, she would be able to see the baby. When the medical examination was over, the young wife felt herself at liberty to talk, and Georgia learnt that, although she had now come for a few days to the Palace solely for the purpose of cheering her mother-in-law, she had not quitted it very long. When Rustam Khan fell into disfavour, he had put his wife and her week-old baby under his mother’s protection at once, fearing that neither his house nor that of Jahan Beg would be safe from the rabble of the city, who were warm partisans of Fath-ud-Din. With high glee, Nur Jahan narrated how her husband had come to visit her in secret, always at hours when the King was not likely to enter the harem, disguised sometimes as a woman and sometimes as a negro, in order to escape the Vizier’s spies; and how once he had actually met his father outside the Queen’s door, but stepping aside respectfully, had passed him without being recognised under the thick veil. To Georgia, the possibility of such adventures within the sacred walls of the harem was a new thing, and she enjoyed the gusto with which Nur Jahan related them. But the Queen thought differently, and began to moan feebly, as she pulled at the edge of the coverlet.