My audience had detained me longer than I had expected, and the evening mist had fairly closed in before I returned.  Entering, not as usual through the grounds and the peristyle, but by the vestibule and my own chamber, and hidden by my half-open window, I overheard an exceedingly characteristic discussion on the incident of the morning.

“Serve her right!” Leenoo was saying.  “That she should for once get the worst of it, and be disbelieved to sharpen the sting!”

“How do you know?” asked Enva.  “I don’t feel so sure we have heard the last of it.”

“Eveena did not seem to have liked her half-hour,” answered Leenoo spitefully.  “Besides, if he did not disbelieve her story, he would have let her prove it.”

“Is that your reliance?” broke in Eunane.  “Then you are swinging on a rotten branch.  I would not believe my ears if, for all that all of us could invent against her, I heard him so much as ask Eveena, ’Are you speaking the truth?’”

“It is very uneven measure,” muttered Enva.

“Uneven!” cried Eunane.  “Now, I think I have the best right to be jealous of her place; and it does sting me that, when he takes me for his companion out of doors, or makes most of me at home, it is so plain that he is taking trouble, as if he grudged a soft word or a kiss to another as something stolen from her.  But he deals evenly, after all.  If he were less tender of her we should have to draw our zones tighter.  But he won’t give us the chance to say, ’Teach the amba with stick and the esve with sugar.’”

“I do say it.  She is never snubbed or silenced; and if she has had worse than what he calls ‘advice’ to-day, I believe it is the first time.  She has never ‘had cause to wear the veil before the household’ [to hide blushes or tears], or found that his ’lips can give sharper sting than their kiss can heal,’ like the rest of us.”

“What for?  If he wished to find her in fault he would have to watch her dreams.  Do you expect him to be harder to her than to us?  He don’t ‘look for stains with a microscope.’  None of us can say that he ‘drinks tears for taste.’  None of us ever ’smarted because the sun scorched him.’  Would you have him ’tie her hands for being white’?” [punish her for perfection].

“She is never at fault because he never believes us against her,” returned Leenoo.

“How often would he have been right?  I saw nothing of to-day’s quarrel, but I know beforehand where the truth lay.  I tell you this:  he hates the sandal more than the sin, but, strange as it seems, he hates a falsehood worse still; and a falsehood against Eveena—­If you want to feel ‘how the spear-grass cuts when the sheath bursts,’ let him find you out in an experiment like this!  You congratulate yourself, Leenoo, that you have got her into trouble. Elnerve that you are!—­if you have, you had better have poisoned his cup before his eyes.  For every tear he sees her shed he will reckon with us at twelve years’ usury.”