Months passed quietly away. Summer came, with furious rains; and then the hot autumn, when the nights were cooled by winds from the hills. The late monsoon followed, and the fields were green as with spring. Mountain torrents plunged from the heights and over the plain to join the turbulent Narmáda stream. And winter was there again:—the mild, sunny winter of the upper Dekkhan, the winter of flowers, the winter of Eden. Great riches brought these seasons to the man who had come, a year before, out of the hills to Mandu. He was known now to every soul in the plateau; and he viewed his adopted land with enchanted eyes. He knew places and parts of Mandu that were not known to men born on its soil. Often he walked alone through the still palace, living amid scenes of the long past, seeing in silent rooms faces of those long since consigned to crematory flames. There were days when memory was on him overpoweringly: when Rai-Khizar-Pál and Ragunáth walked abroad through the corridors and assembly halls; when the Ranee Ahalya, attended by Neila, sat at her embroidery in the tiny room, dreaming of him who was to come to her by night; when Fidá, the slave, watched near the zenana door, waiting, with trembling limbs, for the hour when he might seek his love. These times of vision laid hold of Oman like dreams that are not to be shaken off. But he pursued his way quietly, in the face of the double life decreed for him by his distorted Fates. The winter passed. Spring stole upon the land, and grew, and proclaimed herself again, and got joyous welcome from all the earth. And it was only now, when he had been a year in Mandu, that Oman learned of a strange custom of the new rule. Down upon the shore of the Narmáda, five miles west of Mandu, at the spot where, thirty-three years before, the bodies of the Ranee Ahalya and Fidá had been washed ashore close locked in each other’s arms, there had been raised a little stone temple, whither, once in two years, on the anniversary of the death, the Rajah of Mandu, his officers, and the Brahmans repaired to serve the high gods for the souls of the sinful twain. This custom, inaugurated during the regency of Manava, had been continued through his reign by Bhavani, in whom the act was the one sign of countenance granted toward any one guilty of the degrading sin. The alternating anniversaries of the quadruple death were given to mourning services at the magnificent tomb of Rai-Khizar in the palace temple. And the incongruity of the two acts was much whispered about, but never mentioned before the Rajah.