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 habit of dressing and feeding him, having performed these services for him now and again before there was any absolute necessity therefor; but latterly his limbs had become so useless that lacking her aid he would have gone naked and have died of starvation. She never lamented now that Allah or the Spirits― Minah was always in doubt as to which of the two had the larger share in the ordering of her world— had not seen fit to send her a child in answer to her prayer. Mamat occupied every cranny of her heart, and in his helplessness made to her an appeal stronger far than that which he had made to her in the years of his unspoiled manhood. Most Asiatic women of the better sort find the role of mother more naturally congenial than that of wife, and all that was best in Minah's nature rose up to fortify her in her trial. She was quite blind to the nobility of her own devo- tion, for thoughts of self played but a small part in the consciousness of this daughter of the Muhammadans, and though her simple vocabulary contained no word to express the idea of "duty," she found in the per- formance of the task which she had set herself a deep content that transformed the squalor of her life into a thing of wonder and beauty. And she had to work for both her husband and herself, that there might be rice in the cooking-pot and clothing for their bodies, so her labours in house or in the fields was never ended. The kindly village folk, who pitied her, though they could not repress an occasional jeer at lier eccentric devotion to a leper, lightened her tasks for her in half a hundred ways, and Minah found her