Therefore, seeing that little Sa'adut would be at once his shield and his weapon in the fight which was bound to come between himself and the passionate woman whose eyes blazed at him, he turned to the child with a laugh and a caress. 'Yea, Sa'adut! thou shalt wear the ring; father will keep it for thee.' The answer came swift. 'And why not mother, as heretofore?' Auntie Khôjee sidled again in deprecation of such a tone towards the master. Jehân himself would have given his fighting quail (source of his only steady income) to answer this woman as he answered other women; but he could not. The child, the only child which had come to his reprobate life, was her shield, her weapon also. He looked at this tie between them almost resentfully, and thrust it once more to the van of fight. 'Because, Sa'adut, mother hath had it long enough. Hath she not, sonling? It is father's turn now, is it not?' Sa'adut's big black eyes--they had all his mother's melancholy, with a childish wistfulness superadded to their velvet depths--looked from the woman's face to the man's, from his mother's face to his father's; and a vague perplexity, a still vaguer consciousness of a hidden meaning, came to his childish mind. What did they want, these big people who always took so much upon themselves? Unless _he_ expressed a wish, when theirs had to give way. Suddenly he rose to his feet, a mite of mankind between those two imperious, undisciplined natures which had so thoughtlessly called his into being. The veriest atom of humanity, and yet, by reason of its frailty, its inexperience, more imperious, more undisciplined than that from which it sprung. 'Give it to me, myself!' came his hoarse pipe arrogantly; 'give it to Sa'adut! He will keep it himself. Give it, I say? Give it!' The claim to individual life in a thing to which you have given life, startled even this father and mother. They paused, uncertain. So in a second, ear-piercing shrieks of amazed disappointment rent the air, and there was Khôjee on her knees attempting pacification, while Khâdjee from her tinsels implored immediate gratification. 'Give it him, Nawâb-_sahib_!' she fluttered. 'Lo! he will die in a fit; it is ill denying a child; thou canst take it back when he tires of the plaything.' 'Yea! give it him, _meean_,' pleaded Khôjee, all of a tremble. '"_A child's cry in a house is ill-luck_"; thou canst take it back when he sleeps.' The suggestion struck the keynote of another resentment in Noormahal, making her forget the vague opposition which the child's claim had raised. She caught Sa'adut to her sharply, making that claim her own; for now, thinking only of his helplessness, his cries hurt her physically, making prudence impossible. 'Yea, give it him, Jehân Aziz, Son of Kings!--give it him in jest for a while. It is easy for a father to steal his son's right from him while he sleeps!'