"The courtiers raised me up from the floor, and led me back to the chariot. The prince, who was no other than 'Murakote,' took his, or more properly her, place beside me, and the curtain fell. The play was over. With nothing but the memory of a look, I returned to my now still more dismal rooms. I disrobed myself of all my glittering ornaments with a sigh, bound up my long, shining hair, and sat down to enjoy the only happiness left me,--my proud, swelling thoughts. I was just losing myself in soft, delicious reveries, which illuminated as with a celestial light the whole world within me, when I observed a couple of old duennas, who came fawning upon me, caressing and praising me, while telling me that his Majesty had ordered that I should be in attendance in his supper-chamber that evening. "I listened in mute pain. The power of the new passion that now filled my heart seemed to defy all authority, and the very thing for which I had so long worked and longed had become valueless and as nothing to me. But I dared not excuse myself, so I silently followed my conductresses, and for the first time in my life ascended to his Majesty's private supper-chamber. "How changed I was! that which had been my sole ambition ever since I was ten years old came down upon me with a gush of woe that I could hardly have believed myself capable of feeling. "I sat down to await the coming of the king; but I could have plucked out the heart that had rushed so madly on, casting its young life away at the feet of a man whose name even I did not know, whose face I had not seen till that day, but the tones of whose voice were still sounding through and through my quivering pulses. "Well, my forehead, if not my heart, I laid at his Majesty's feet. 'I am your slave, my lord,' said my voice, the sound of which startled my own ears, so hollow and deceptive did it seem. "'Do you know how fascinating you were this evening?' said the king. 'Older by forty years than my father,' thought I, as, dissembling still, I replied, 'Your slave does not know.' 'But you were, and I am sure you deserve to be a queen,' he added, trying to play the gallant. 'My lord is too gracious to his slave,' I murmured. "'Why, Thieng!' he said, speaking to my eldest sister; 'why have you hidden this beauty away from me so long? Let her not be called Choy[17] any longer, but Chorm.'[18] I would weary you if I tried to tell you how he praised and flattered me, and how before a week was over I was the proudest woman in the palace.