“Not so fast, comrade. What hast thou to carry to the King? Young Bhavani wanders by accident into Ragunáth’s rooms. My lord himself goes for a walk. By accident he meets the Ranee Ahalya in the poppy field. They scarcely speak. She returns home with her woman and me;—my lord remains there on whatever business is his. Bah, Kasya! The fool is punished now. Doubt it not. The Ranee can lash a man with her eyes, an she will; and Ragunáth was not favored to-day. I swear that by Lakshmi. A turmoil is never the result of wisdom. Let it rest, Kasya.” Churi was committed in good earnest, now. For his own sake the affair must not go up to the Rajah. “I thought—” Kasya bent his brows, “I feared the Ranee did not disdain him wholly. If you speak truth, however—” Churi shrugged. “Then let it pass. In time we shall show him that the Rajah’s will is done in Mandu.” And, with a sigh, Kasya turned and departed. Churi’s desire for company had gone, apparently; for he made no move to return to the common room. For a few moments he stood in his own doorway, brows drawn, head bent, meditating. Then he turned inside, and dropped the hanging across the open space, to prevent interruption. Stretching himself out on an improvised but remarkably comfortable divan, he gave himself up to a more critical consideration of the drama that had been revealed to him that afternoon. It was a thing that he had never dreamed of. A day before, he would not have believed that he could be so calmly reviewing the situation that evidently existed between the one thing he cared for in Mandu—Ahalya—and the Mohammedan captive. If it piqued him that he had had no knowledge of its beginnings,—he, to whom every intrigue enacted in the palace during the last ten years had been an open book,—he could console himself with the reflection that he was still the only one that knew of it at all. But he wished especially to understand himself with regard to Fidá, toward whom, as yet, he felt no animosity. Fidá, however, continued to baffle him. He could come to no satisfactory opinion. His concealment of what he knew from Kasya, though it had come about accidentally, gave him little anxiety; for it was perfectly consistent with his usual methods: those plots and plans and hopes in which he, even he, the eunuch, constantly indulged.