Ahalya experienced a sudden feeling of relief. He slept. His sleep would wear the night away. She was free to go. Joyously, softly, swiftly, she passed out of that room and the next; but in the antechamber beyond she paused. Three or four rooms and a passage lay between her and the zenana. These she appeared to be in no haste to traverse. Halting indecisively, she stood looking about her as if in search of something—or some one; and her brow was drawn in meditation. Then, all at once, she started, not in the direction of her apartments, but through another door that led off into a long range of rooms, little used, in one of which the captive slave of Rai-Khizar-Pál had had the audacity to sleep on the first night of his coming to Mandu; and the use of which the lenient Rajah had afterward granted him. As she continued on her way, Ahalya’s excitement and her speed increased until she was fairly running along, her eyes, meantime, swiftly examining each room as soon as she entered it. At last, when her breath had become panting, and her color unnaturally brilliant; when, as it would seem, she began to realize what she was doing, she reached, by her devious route, the antechamber to the zenana, where an eunuch stood on guard. And he stared in amazement at her flushed and frowning face as she hurried past him into her voluntary captivity. It was as well that the Ranee Ahalya sought her sleep that night without having peered out of her screened windows into the inner court; for had she done so, she might have found by accident that which she had unsuccessfully sought. For, till a very late hour that night, Fidá, the slave, risking his life, crouched in the shadow of the fountain of that court, watching, with burning eyes, the glow of a single lamp that shone in the Lady Ahalya’s rooms: a lamp which, though he knew it not, was never extinguished. And so, when weariness finally overcame him, he crept away without learning whether or not the lady of his dreams was sleeping behind her imprisoning walls. CHAPTER IV THE ASRA RUBY