Naturally enough, this brought the girl's curiosity, long restless, to his aid; and she sat listening to the many things he had to tell her, with that faintly mysterious smile of hers. And as she listened, she watched a pigeon, all jewelled about its bosom in rainbow hues, and with a dainty little pair of silver jingles about its jasper feet, which was coquetting and pirouetting to attract the attention of its neighbours on the wide marble sill of her latticed window. For Laila had a room in the upper storey all painted, carved, and set with little balconies, which was worthy of any king's favourite. And Father Ninian, mindful lingeringly of the fine ladies' boudoirs of his youth in Rome, had filled it, against her return from school, with all the prettiest spoils of the palace. Sèvres vases, rare old cabinets, quaint carved tables which had been brought thither for the dead Nawabs; treasures that were also, inevitably, of the king's-favourite type,--therefore unlike the owner of the room, as she sat in her white muslin frock, heavy-eyed, almost sallow, from the last night's dissipation. "So she--my grandmother, you say--was a dancing-girl--a real dancing-girl?" Even her surprise and curiosity were listless. Yet the next moment, while Akbar was protesting the superiority of Anâri Begum over all the dancing-girls of his vast experience, she had burst into a sudden laugh, uncovered one of the trays with kicks which sent first one, then the other of her bronze slippers flying, seized on a pair of silver anklets, and there she was centring a Persian rug spread on the marble floor as if she had been born to it. Coquetting, pirouetting, with a challenging clash, a half-impudent jerk of the jingles, for all the world like the pigeon on the window-sill. Like something else also; so that old Akbar felt a shiver run through him, lest, after all, his first impression should prove right, and this be no more than a _simulacrum_,--a ghost, a changeling, come to possess the usually indifferent lazy Miss-_baba_. Yet when, all of a sudden, she raised her white muslin skirt high in both hands and began to sing, at the top of her voice, the wicked little love song which Vincent Dering had sung the first day she met him, old Akbar's dread turned to sheer wonder. This was not a ghost, but a devil; reckless, unrestrained, with a fling of white arms, a kick of white feet, all held to rhythm by the outrageous frivolity of the song, until, with that last staccato note, she threw herself in a chair, breathless, gurgling with laughter and sheer mischief. "Lo! Akbar," she gasped, "my grandmother never danced like that, did she? I don't believe she was my grandmother! I believe you are telling stories!" Akbar looked wise, and thrust out his folded hands in cringing protest. "The most noble says true, Anâri Begum never danced thus. But there is the grandfather, Bun-avâtar-_sahib bahadur_, to be accounted for also."