It was the most difficult morning that Oman had ever spent. He had had no preparation for his situation, no time to arrange a course of work. Hitherto he had preached in small towns, to mere handfuls of uneducated men and women. Now he stood before a critical assembly of young noblemen, all of whom had had considerable instruction in abstract thinking and reasoning: far more, no doubt, than he himself had ever known. That he impressed them all, immediately, as a man of dignity and wisdom, of wide knowledge of men and high purity of mind, was again probably due to his years of miracle-working solitude. To his own keen satisfaction, Oman felt that he had begun well with his school; and he determined, in his heart, that the end should be better still. For a month or more, then, he was invisible to every one save his pupils. He found that a full and detailed exposition of his creed to thinking and sometimes sceptical men, demanded a new labor of thought, a new working out of little things that had hitherto been mere suggestions in his own mind; the rejection of some ideas that proved themselves impossible; and the admission of others that he had not hitherto acknowledged. This work, while difficult, gave him the keenest delight; for the breadth and fulness of his logic was coming home to him; and he perceived that this creation of his brain was no puny shadow, but a thing finely formed, capable of proper development. He, the seeker after Truth, had found it; and from the heights was bringing it to men. It was its own greatest reward. At the end of six weeks, his labors began to be less exacting. He had reduced his own thinking to a system; and he now began to introduce other studies than philosophy into this school, where arithmetic of the simplest kind, and writing in any living language, were considered not as necessaries but as arts. Oman found time now to see something of the palace and of its Rajah, who eagerly sought his society. A few days wrought great changes in his quiet existence; and presently an incident, entirely unexpected, brought him a revelation which, for some time to come, eclipsed every other interest in his mind. During the six weeks of close work, the circumstances attendant on his first meeting with Bhavani had slipped from Oman’s mind. He no longer thought of the scene by the parapet behind the water-palace, or of Zenaide, the woman with wonderful hair. But now, in mid-May, she was recalled to him. One noon, as he sat in his room meditating through the hot hours, a slave-boy broke in upon him and delivered to him a message to the effect that the lady Zenaide desired the presence of Oman the sage, that she might hear the creed he taught.