“What is your name?” I asked.
“Phooli-jân, Huzoor,” she answered, with a brilliant dazzling smile.
I sat looking at her, wondering if a more appropriate name could have been found for that figure among the anemones and celandines, the primulas, pansies, and pinks – the thousand-and-one blossoms which, glowing against their groundwork of forget-me-nots, formed a jewel-mosaic right to the foot of the snows above us. Flowerful life! Truly that was hers. She had a great bunch of scarlet rhododendron stuck behind her ear, matching the cloth cap perched jauntily on her head, and as she sat herding her buffaloes on the upland she had threaded chaplet on chaplet of oxeyed daisies, and hung them about her wherever they could be hung. The result was distinctly flowerful; her face also was distinctly pretty, distinctly clean for a Kashmiri girl’s. But coquette, flirt, minx, was written in every line of it, and accounted for a most unusual neatness and brightness.
She caught my eye and smiled again, broadly, innocently. “The Huzoor would like to paint my picture, wouldn’t he?” she went on, in a tone of certainty. “The Sahib who came last year gave me five rupees. I will take six this year. Food is dear, and...