The king was not disposed to look unfavourably at this communication. The trammels which his benefactor, as the sanguinary slave always called himself, had cast upon him, cramped his youthful and ardent spirit. Nothing but his affection for the daughter made him hesitate upon sacrificing the father. This caused him at first to waver; he thought upon her beauty, her accomplishments, and his passion began to blaze. How would she endure to see her father given up to certain death by the man who professed to love her as his own soul? Would she not spurn him, would she not shrink with loathing from the destroyer of her parent? He reflected upon that parent’s baseness, his ambition, his tyranny; but his love for Agha bore down all opposition arising from the contemplation of her father’s worthlessness, and he finally determined to protect the man whom by every principle of equity he was bound to sacrifice. Lallcheen meanwhile was not insensible to what was going on. He was now more than ever anxious that his daughter should be united to the reigning monarch, as he imagined it would tend to confirm his own influence in the state, and put an end at once to those hostile measures which the family of Gheias-ood-Deen were taking to vindicate the wrongs of their royal relative: it would moreover enable him to command the whole energies of Shums-ood-Deen’s kingdom, civil, political and military, which he would have the power of employing to counteract the hostile intentions of his foes. He felt himself, nevertheless, in a state of great embarrassment, and began to entertain such designs as are generally the resort of desperate men. Although conscious of his unpopularity, he had nevertheless secured the favour of the troops by paying up their arrears, and allowing them some privileges which they had never hitherto enjoyed. All the disaffected Omrahs too, of whom there were not a few, tendered him their services, and declared that they would maintain his cause to the last drop of their blood. He, however, was fully aware how little confidence is to be placed either upon the professions or promises of unprincipled men. His own heart was a faithful interpreter of what such promises and professions amounted to, and he therefore felt anything but in a state of security. This rendered him desperate. The opposition of his daughter had so exasperated him against her that he had treated her with a severity which, instead of subduing her resolution, had only the more firmly determined her to thwart his wishes with an indomitable resolution, which he did not imagine she possessed. To all his promises of tenderness towards her, if she would only relax from her stubborn opposition, she replied by a calm look of defiance, that moved him more than once to acts of violence. She shrank not from the arm that struck her to the earth, but rose without a murmur of complaint, and smiled upon the impotent malice that would stifle her conscience under the