“Oh yes, you can see him,” said Mabel, guessing at the tenor of the request, and she held up the baby. It was not by any means her intention that Ismail Bakhsh should take the child from her arms, but this he did at once. “Oh, you’ll make him cry!” protested Flora. “Nay, Miss Sahib, he will know me, that I am the servant of his house. Was I not for ten years Sinjāj Kīlin Sahib’s orderly, going in and out with him?” “All the same, I don’t quite see how that should make you an authority on babies, my good man,” murmured Flora, and told Mabel Ismail Bakhsh’s qualifications for the post he had usurped. But the baby lay quite quietly in his arms, as though it recognised the force of the ancestral tie. “The Baba Sahib has the eyes of Nāth Sahib, not of Kīlin Sahib,” was the self-constituted nurse’s next remark, delivered in a tone of keen regret. “True, but some children’s eyes change colour, just as kittens’ do. Perhaps his will,” suggested Flora, gravely and consolingly. “Georgia wouldn’t like that,” objected Mabel, when this was translated to her. “I’m afraid poor Mrs North won’t see much of him, if the regiment have their way,” said Flora. “Do you know what Ismail Bakhsh is saying now?” “I shall carry the Baba Sahib daily into the air, that he may grow tall and strong,” the old man was announcing. “And as soon as he learns to walk I shall bring a little pony--a very little pony, Miss Sahib”--this in answer to the protest he discerned in Flora’s face--“and I shall teach him to ride without saddle or bridle, that he may be like his grandfather, and I shall instruct him in the use of arms, so that when he joins the regiment with the Empress’s commission he will have no occasion to learn anything. He is to be a soldier from the day of his birth.” “Oh, how his father would have loved to teach him to ride!” murmured Mabel, with tears in her eyes. “The regiment will be his father, Miss Sahib. Is he not the son of Sinjāj Kīlin?” “No, he isn’t!” cried Mabel, “and I don’t know why you should persist in leaving out his own father. Have you forgotten him already?” Flora translated the question, and the old man answered it solemnly. “The Baba Sahib has no father until he has avenged him, Miss Sahib. We shall tell him of all Nāth Sahib’s doings, and how he was lured to his death by guile, but he must not take his name upon his lips until he can say, ‘Now there is not one left alive that had any part in that accursed deed, for I his son have tracked them out and slain them all.’” “I don’t think Georgia will quite approve of the principles in which the regiment proposes to educate her boy,” said Mabel.