It fell on Khôjeeya Khânum's ears, making her heart sink with its implied warning; for a child doomed to disease, like little Sa'adut, the heir to the Heirship of Nothingness, was but faint hold on the soaring honours of royalty. And Jehân Aziz, his father, was a fainter one still. Rumours had come, even to the wide ruined courtyard, of official reprimands, of threats. What wonder, when even the more reputable members of the royal family looked askance at his doings? Still he was master in that house, and as that was his day for the weekly visit of ceremony he vouchsafed to his lawful wife, it behoved Khôjee to prepare for it after established rule. Khâdeeja Khânum, Khôjee's twin sister, had already done her share of preparation. She had put on her best pink satin trousers and a spangled green veil, in which she sate, squatted on a string bed set in the women's court, and sewed at a tinsel cap for the head of the house--that being the correct etiquette on such occasions. And Khâdeeja was far more correct than Khôjeeya. In fact, her position in the household was quite different, seeing that she had been betrothed in her youth to an ancient suitor who died before she was old enough to be claimed, while no one had ever made a bid for Khôjee's limp. So, while the latter's few trinkets had a trick of remaining with the pawnbroker, Khâdjee's never paid even a temporary visit to that official. Then her clothes, from that decorous sitting on string beds instead of breathless spinning in the dust, remained so spick and span, that Noormahal, poor soul! when money ran scarce for the heir's medicine, would accuse the general scapegoat of extravagance in providing them. On these occasions Khôjee never retorted that the white muslin in which the Nawâbin denied herself was, in the end, more expensive. Neither did she meet Khâdjee's demand for more tinsel with the brutal truth that the caps were too old-fashioned for Jehân Aziz to wear. Family facts of this sort she did not even divulge in her prayers; for Khôjeeya Khânum's religion, like her life, was strictly impersonal. It could be nothing else, since it was barely decent for a woman to intrude even her own salvation on a Creator whose attributes were distinctly masculine! So, while Khâdjee sewed and Noormahal cuddled the sleeping Sa'adut as she crouched on another bed, Khôjee dragged out the state carpet--whence all the state and most of the carpet had retired in favour of bare string--set the cushions, prepared the pipe, the sherbet, and the hand punkah, lest the master should be fatigued by his condescension; for, to her, all these ceremonies were a sort of sacrament to any intercourse between the sexes, without which it was distinctly improper, and with which it was possible to receive even a scapegrace with benefit to yourself.