'Mrs. Boynton was most welcome to the Ayôdhya pot,' blurted out George hastily. '_Cela va sans dire!_ It is just because we love to give the pretty things to the pretty creatures that it becomes unwise to let the pretty creatures see the pretty things.' 'Then it is your fault, to begin with,' interrupted Rose hotly. 'Exactly so. I'm sure, Miss Tweedie, you have heard me say a dozen times that we men are to blame for all the weaknesses of women. They are simply the outcome of our likes and dislikes; and they will remain so until there is a perpetual leap-year.' 'For heaven's sake, Keene,' said Dan, laughing, 'lead the way to the potter's or there will be murder done on the King's Highway! Don't mind him, Miss Rose! He "only says it to annoy because he knows it teases." He doesn't really believe anything of the kind.' Lewis, his eye-glass more aggressive than ever, murmured something under his breath about the inevitable courses of nature, as Rose, with her head held very high, followed George Keene into the potter's yard. It was a scene strangely at variance with the party entering it. Indeed, old Fuzl Elâhi, who had never before set eyes on an Englishwoman, would have started from his work had not George detained him with reassuring words: 'He tells his yarns best when he is at the wheel,' he explained as he dragged forward a low string stool for Rose. 'And I want you to hear an awfully queer one called "The Wrestlers." You know enough of the language to understand him at any rate.' 'Miss Tweedie is a better scholar than most of us,' remarked Lewis Gordon curtly from the seat he had found beside Dan on a great log of wood; one of those logs so often to be seen in such courtyards--relics, perhaps, of some ineffectual intention of repair long since forgotten. This one might, to all appearance, have fallen where it lay in those bygone days of which the potter told tales, when the now treeless desert had been a swampy jungle on the borders of an inland sea. The afternoon sun, slanting over the grass palisades, played havoc with the humanity it found gathered round the wheel by sending their shadows distorted to long lengths across the yard, and tilting them at odd angles against the irregular wall of the mud hut beyond. Altogether a conglomerate pyramid of shadows, with the potter's high turban dominating it as he sat silent, spinning his wheel. And as the clay curved and hollowed beneath his moulding hand a puzzled look came to the light eyes, which, usually so shifty, were now fixed with a sort of fascination upon that strange figure in the riding-habit. 'It is not there,' he muttered uneasily, 'I cannot find a clew.' George gave Rose the triumphant glance of a child displaying a mechanical toy when it behaves as it ought to behave. The potter was evidently in a mad mood, and might be trusted for a good performance. 'Now, Fuzl Elâhi, we want "The Wrestlers," please. The Miss sahiba has never heard it.'