-possessed, he entered my room
with a face whose paleness and compressed lips indicated intense
emotion; and, laying his hand on my shoulder, expressed his feeling
rather in look and tone than in his few broken and not very
significant words. After a few moments, however, he recovered his
coolness, and asked me to supply the deficiencies of Eveena's story. I
told him briefly but exactly what had passed from the moment when I
missed her to that of her rescue. He listened without the slightest
symptom of surprise or anger to the tale of the Regent's indifference,
and seemed hardly to understand the disgust and indignation with which
I dwelt upon it. When I had finished--

"You have made," he said, "an enemy, and a dangerous one; but you have
also secured friends against whose support even the anger of a greater
than the Zampta might break as harmlessly as waves upon a rock. He
behaved only as any one else would have done; and it is useless to be
angry with men for being what they habitually and universally are.
What you did for Eveena, one of ourselves, perhaps, but no other,
might have risked for a first bride on the first day of her marriage.
Indeed, though I am most thankful to you, I should, perhaps, have
withheld my consent to my daughter's request had I supposed that you
felt so strongly for her."

"I think," I replied with some displeasure, "that I may positively
affirm that I have spoken no word to your daughter which I should not
have spoken in your presence. I am too unfamiliar with your ideas to
know whether your remark has the same force and meaning it would have
borne among my own people; but to me it conveys a grave reproach. When
I accepted the charge of your daughter during this day's excursion, I
thought of her only as every man thinks of a young, pretty, and gentle
girl of whom he has seen and knows scarcely anything. To avail myself
of what has since happened to make a deeper impression on her feelings
than you might approve would have seemed to me unpardonable
treachery."

"You do utterly misunderstand me," he answered. "It may be that Eveena
has received an impression which will not be effaced from her mind. It
may be that this morning, could I have foreseen it, I should have
decidedly wished to avoid anything that would so impress her. But that
feeling, if it exist, has been caused by your acts and not by your
words. That you should do your utmost, at any risk to yourself, to
save her, is consist