The years passed in peace and well-doing until the Rajah attained his five and thirtieth year. Then came an event which, for a long time, seemed to have turned the severely upright ruler quite out of his course, and to have made him a man of men, erring and weak. From some distant land, none knew where, there came to Mandu one of those purely Indian characters, known long before the time of the great Buddha: a religious courtesan, a woman of supreme beauty and magnetic power, by name Zenaide. How, by what means, she got her first audience of Bhavani, no one knew. But within a month after that, she was installed in the long empty water-palace, where she dwelt as a queen among men, or, as men whispered, the Queen of a King. That whisper was an ugly one, but it found ear for a long time. Bhavani, immovable by wiles, impervious to temptation, adamant against force, seemed voluntarily to have fallen to this woman; and it was not till after his death that his people perceived how their Rajah, unconquered by her, had been her conqueror, ruling her beauty and her will by the inviolable purity of his mind. But, at the time when Oman came to Mandu, in the Rajah’s forty-second year, no one understood what were the relations between the mistress of the beautiful little palace, and the King of the great building near by. They were much together. Zenaide, indeed, was with no one else. How, then, should men not wonder, and watch, and whisper together? It was March, and the half-dead world had been undergoing its annual rejuvenescence. In the late afternoon, when the shadows are long, and bird-calls are beginning again, Bhavani, the day’s state at an end, went walking slowly down the open garden that bordered the road between the two palaces, and finally halted at the stone parapet built along the edge of the plateau. Two slaves followed the King, but halted at a respectful distance as he paused, gazing down over the green plain and its shining river. After a few seconds he noticed that another than he stood near by, also leaning upon the parapet:— a man, tall and gaunt, clad in a much-worn garment, his head and feet bare. Something about the figure drew Bhavani’s attention, and, looking farther, he suddenly caught the man’s eyes—great, limpid eyes, laden with the sorrow of the world. A significant look passed between the two. Oman had also swept the figure before him, upward, from the embroidered shoes, over the rich dress, to the face, finely chiselled, but cast in a mould of melancholy. There he who had won purity through the flames of hell, gazed upon him to whom birth had given all good, and who had taken upon his slender shoulders some of the burden of the world. In the first instant of the meeting eyes, each found kinship in the other. Bhavani moved a little toward the stranger, and asked, in a suppressed voice: “Thou art newly come to Mandu?” “I crossed the causeway two days since.” “Whence art thou come?” “Out of the hills.”