'I don't quite understand it all,' he said thoughtfully. 'He is a fool, and yet he is playing his cards well. Do you know, I shouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Chândni was back again as chief adviser. She is a very clever woman. It seems that there is a scheme on foot for establishing stud farms or grazing paddocks for Government remounts. It is supposed to be cheaper and better in the end to buy them as yearlings and let them run loose, instead of being tethered heels, heads, and tails, in native fashion. And as the water supply is to be constant at Hodinuggur now, Dalel proposes that Government should utilise some of his waste land there, and put him in charge, or partly in charge. Of course it would bring him in a steady income if he gets his finger in the pie.' 'He ought to get nothing,' interrupted Rose hastily; 'I believe he was at the bottom of all that intrigue. We shall never know what went on exactly, but there was intrigue, and that sort of thing should be punished.' 'Undoubtedly; but as I said before, Dalel is a fool--except about a horse. It was the old man and Chândni; they belonged to that age. This man tries to break the Ten Commandments in two languages, and misses the idiom in both. But he does know the points of a horse, and as Government must keep up these old families and try to civilise them, it is as well to get some work out of them.' 'Hodinuggur civilised! I can't imagine it,' echoed Rose. 'When I think of the old potter, and that mirrored room on the roof--of Azîzan and the Ayôdhya pot--it seems like some old dream of life into which we nineteenth century folk strayed by mistake.' 'With disastrous results,' put in Lewis thoughtfully. 'Well! with half the _dramatis personæ_ of the play dead, and the other half married, it ought to have come to an end now like a decently behaved melodrama. Not a very moral one, I'm afraid, Miss Tweedie, and virtue must be its own reward.' 'What do you mean?' she asked. 'You and I have been left out of the prizes altogether; but then, as the potter said, we didn't belong to his world.' 'I wish you had not reminded me of that scene,' she interrupted hastily. 'I cannot help thinking of how Mr. Fitzgerald sat smiling at me while the old man measured him; just as George did when he measured himself, and he is dead.' 'What a woman you are when all is said and done!' he replied, smiling at her. 'Still I do think that poetic justice has not been meted out all round. Gwen, for instance, has everything she wants, and I am out in the cold.' 'Do you feel out in the cold?' asked Rose aggressively. He hastened to assure her that on the contrary he was quite warm and comfortable, but in spite of this the conversation languished till Colonel Tweedie came in, full of his intention of recommending Dalel Beg's plan strongly to the authorities.