a-Dahit kissed him on the cheek and gave him the thick, loose chain of
gold he wore.

"For this was it you risked your life going to Mandakan," said Pango
Dooni, angrily, to his son; "for a maid with a body like a withered
gourd." Then all at once, with a new look in his face, he continued
softly: "Thou hast the soul of a woman, but thy deeds are the deeds
of a man. As thy mother was in heart so art thou."

......................

Day was breaking over Mandakan, and all the city was a tender pink.
Tower and minaret were like inverted cups of ruddy gold, and the streets
all velvet dust, as Pango Dooni, guided by Cushnan Di, halted at the wood
of wild peaches, and a great thicket near to the Aqueduct of the Failing
Fountain, and looked out towards the Palace of the Dakoon. It was the
time of peach blossoms, and all through the city the pink and white
petals fell like the gay crystals of a dissolving sunrise. Yet there
rose from the midst of it a long, rumbling, intermittent murmur, and here
and there marched columns of men in good order, while again disorderly
bands ran hither and hither with krises waving in the sun, and the red
turban of war wound round their heads.

They could not see the front of the Palace, nor yet the Residency Square,
but, even as they looked, a cannonade began, and the smoke of the guns
curled through the showering peach-trees. Hoarse shoutings and cries
came rolling over the pink roofs, and Cumner's Son could hear through all
the bugle-call of the artillery.

A moment later Cushnan Di was leading them through a copse of pawpaw