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 told him that the woman was Aziza Nurmahal's old nurse, Ayesha Zemzem, a Bakhtiari hill woman from the western wilds; too, gave him a richly colored and extravagantly embroidered account of how the princess had raised her to the rank of regent, with the honorable title of Zil-i-Sultana, “Shadow of the Queen,” and had afterwards reduced her to her former, humble position, because she had been in favor of granting "concessions” to the saheb-log.

Hector whistled.

“Concessions! Is that the rub in Tamerlanistan?” he thought.

For he was familiar, through the number of Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Chinese he had known in London, with that phase of chronic misunderstanding between the Orient and the Occident. He rather sympathized with the former and had always held that it is not altogether altruistic to “carry the white man's burden” with the help of cheap, stout native labor, cheaper raw material, and one hundred per cent yearly profits on every pound sterling invested.

He was not a business-man. Eton and the army had spoiled him for that. But, beneath all his other, at times slightly erratic and unexpected characteristics, he had a great deal of plain, straight English commonsense, and he decided that if, as it seemed, he was going to have a voice in the affairs of Tamerlanistan, he would think twice before he advocated the granting of any “concessions.”

By this time Ayesha Zemzem had finished her tale, had been petted and scolded and wept and laughed over