men would be on fire with passion for her under such
intimate circumstances, and reveal the fact without loss of time; she
was not quite so sound asleep as not to be aware of her own beauty and
its spell, yet she dared to experiment on men and rouse their emotions.
Let her, then, take the consequences!

Soon, Joyce found herself in front of the ruined palace, standing on
higher ground, its dome and minarets visible for miles in a setting of
dense foliage and drooping palms. It had been built in the sixteenth
century for heathen worship, and subsequently converted by a Mohammedan
grandee into a residence for his own accommodation and that of his
harem. To Joyce it looked an irregular mass of ruined masonry, roofless
in parts and overgrown with jungle. The portion which had been reserved
to the women formed a separate wing which at one time had been enclosed
by a high wall, but which was now reduced to mounds of fallen brick-work
and shattered concrete. "The place looks almost as though it had
suffered bombardment," she said, "how desolate and weird!"

"I could tell you a romance connected with that wing which savours of
the _Arabian Nights_," said Dalton. "Want to hear it?"

"How do you know so much more about it than any one else?" she asked,
accompanying him gingerly over the fallen masonry to gain a better view
of the harem. All around them the undergrowth was dense and matted;
date-palms reared themselves from thickets and mingled their drooping
branches with tamarind trees, the prickly _babul_, and the wild
_jamun_[16].

[Footnote 16: Indian blackberry.]

"I make it my business to know all about every place I live in," he
returned.

"Tell me the romance," she commanded.

Dalton spread the rug on a grassy mound, and when they had seated
themselves, he began his tale in true Oriental fashion, with a charm of
style that captured her fancy.

"Once upon a time, when the land belonged to those who could hold it by
the sword, a rich Nawab built himself a costly residence out of a
heathen temple. Behold the residence!"--with a wave of his hand. "And
with him dwelt his retinue and his sycophants, his child-wife, and the
women who contributed to her needs and his pleasures.

"Alas, for masculine confidence! In a moment of weakness, this great
prince took into his service a young warrior of Rajputana as the chief
of his bodyguard--a Hindu by religion and of exclusive caste--because of
his great strength and the beau