ite
hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body
covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the tamala flower, in sign
of mourning for Dharma, her father, the king of the south, who had
fallen in battle beneath the steel-shod tusks of the war elephants.

She knelt before the peacock throne, and Vikramavati saw that her face
was as beautiful as the moon on the fourteenth day, that her black locks
were like female snakes, her waist like the waist of a she-lion, her
arms like twin marble columns blue-veined, her skin like the sweetly
scented champaka flower, and her breasts as the young tinduka fruit.

He looked into her eyes and saw that they were of a deep bronze color,
gold flecked, and with pupils that were black and opaque--eyes that
seemed to hold all the wisdom, all the secret mockery, the secret
knowledge of womanhood--and his hand trembled, and he thought in his
soul that the bountiful hand of Sravanna, the God of Plenty, had been
raised high in the western heaven at the hour of her birth.

"Remember the words of the Brahmin," grumbled Deo Singh, his old prime
minister who had served his father before him and who was watching him
anxiously, jealously. "'Woman is the greatest robber of all. For other
robbers steal property which is spiritually worthless, such as gold and
diamonds; while woman steals the best--a man's heart, and soul, and
ambition, and strength.' Remember, furthermore, the words of--"

"Enough croakings for the day, Leaky-Tongue!" cut in Vikramavati, with
the insolent rashness of his twenty-four years. "Go home to your
withered beldame of a wife and pray with her before the altar of unborn
children, and help her clean the household pots. This is the season when
I speak of love!"

"Whose love--yours or the girl's?" smilingly asked Madusadan, captain of
horse, a man ten years the king's senior, with a mocking, bitter eye, a
great, crimson mouth, a crunching chest, massive, hairy arms, the honey
of eloquence on his tongue, and a mind that was a deer in leaping, a cat
in climbing. Men disliked him because they could not beat him in joust
or tournament; and women feared him because the purity of his life,
which was an open book, gave the lie to his red lips and the
slow-eddying flame in his hooded, brown eyes. "Whose love, wise king?"

But the latter did not hear.

He dismissed the soldiers and ministers and courtiers with an impatient
gesture, and stepped down from his p