cannot answer the question. Perhaps it was just unthinkingly on
the spur of the moment that I did what I did. Without a word I thrust
into Mirza Shah's hand the roughly completed horoscope. There was no
note in it of the flaming star that at the last had marred the
favourable showing.

"Mirza Shah, under my instructions, had become skilled enough to
interpret the general significance of such a diagram with its
accompanying symbols.

"'Ah, my friend,' he exclaimed in fervent delight, 'this is indeed
excellent. He will be clever and brave and handsome, everything that a
father could wish. Get ready the emblazoned scroll at once. Now I shall
go. There are others to whom to tell the glad news, and to your mistress
even now shall I try to whisper the splendid omens the stars have traced
for us here.'

"He tapped the rough chart with a forefinger, then handed it back to me,
and was gone.

"Let my story hasten on, just as the years hastened on. The boy grew up
to be a comely lad, much in my companionship, for he came to me to learn
to read and write Persian and Arabic. But although I loved him well,
never any single day did he come into my sight but my heart was smitten
with self reproach. Why had I, by suppressing the truth, allowed this
child to live even for an hour beyond the hour of his birth? The
foreordained murderer of his good and noble father!--to my eyes the
decree of fate was branded on the very brow of the boy.

"Yet did I console myself and justify myself. At times I even dared to
indulge a doubting mood as to the certainty of the celestial writing of
fate. Could a bright, open-faced child like this one seated at my knee,
book in hand, ever come to commit the most abominable of human
crimes--to slay his own dearly loving father?

"'Impossible!' I would murmur to myself, and would thus resolutely shut
the gates of my heart to the whispering of conscience.

"But in any case it was now too late to speak. The boy was endeared to
his father and to his mother, the idol of both their lives. Mirza Shah
would have gladly died, well I knew, for his son. Why then should I
interfere? Kismet! Let destiny take its course. Even I, in withholding
the truth, had been an instrument in the hand of fate. And had it not
been written that I should so act? Who, indeed, but Allah can change the
course of events?

"By such arguments I became reconciled to abide with peace of mind the
workings of destiny. And so years rolled on