Stafford led Lois out into the center, and one pair after another followed his example. With Travers still at his side, the Rajah drew back from the now crowded floor of dancers, and watched the scene with glistening, eager eyes, happy at last to be in the midst of them--the Great People of the world. It was a brilliant scene, for Travers had spared nothing. The sides of the marquee banked with flowers, the music, the brilliant dresses and uniforms, were all calculated to impress a mind as yet curiously unspoiled by the pomp and magnificence of the East. They impressed Nehal Singh deeply; his mind was filled with a wonder and pleasure which did something toward soothing the first bitter disappointment that the evening had brought him. But above all else, he wondered at himself and the rapidity of the fate which in two short weeks had swept him out of his solitude into the very vortex of a world unknown to him save through his books. He asked himself what power it was that had flung aside caste, religion, education, like a child's sandcastle before the onrush of a mighty tide. Caste, religion, hatred of the foreigner, these things had been sown deep into him, had been fostered and trained like precious plants, and now they were dead at the first contact with European ideas. They were gone as though they had never been. He had made no resistance. He had drifted with the stream, regardless of the entreating, threatening hands held out to him; yielding to a divine power stronger than himself, stronger far than the implanted principles of his life. His wonder, though he did not know it, was shared by the Englishman at his side. Travers, accustomed as he was to look upon human theories and principles as buyable and saleable appendages, could not suppress a mild surprise at the rapidity with which this Hindu prince had assimilated the ideas and mental attitude of another hemisphere. Possibly it could be traced back to the parrot-like propensities of all inferior races, but Travers, much as the solution appealed to him, could not accept it. A parrot that assumes with apparent ease the ways of his master within a fortnight, and thereby retains a striking originality of his own, is not an ordinary parrot, and the conviction was dawning on Travers that Nehal Singh was not an ordinary Hindu. The unusual simplicity of his dress, which nevertheless concealed a costly and refined taste, his firm though unpretentious bearing, the energy with which he had overthrown what Travers guessed must have been a fairly violent opposition on the part of his priestly advisers, pointed to a decided, interesting and perhaps, under certain circumstances, dangerous personality. The latter part of this deduction had not as yet struck Travers in its full force, but so much he at least felt that he proceeded to go warily, relying on his diplomacy and still more on a weapon which was not the less effective for being kept, as on this occasion, in the background.