ge
matters that she should be included among the fatal seven.

It is supposed that the king's opposition to the immemorial custom
really took definite shape on the day upon which his orphan
granddaughter entered upon her thirteenth year. Be this as it may, it
was not long afterwards that Juda, pious monarch as he was, ventured to
hint to Zorah his opinion that the time had arrived when the Sacrifice
of the Maidens might very well be abolished. But Zorah, a zealot of
zealots, would not hear of such a thing, possibly because, among other
reasons, the abolition would rob him of an appreciable amount of the
power which he now possessed, and which power, it was hinted, had been
more than once wielded to secure--for a substantial consideration--the
elimination of a name from the list of the chosen. Juda, of course,
might have approached the high priest with a similar proposal on behalf
of his granddaughter; but there were several reasons against it, one of
which was that the king was, according to his lights, a just monarch,
and would have scorned to secure the princess's exemption by any such
means, while another was that he shrewdly suspected Zorah would refuse
to forgo such a marked demonstration of his power and, in addition, give
himself away even at the cost of an enormous bribe.

Under these circumstances the king, while not actually revolting openly
from the dictum of the high priest, had instituted among the people a
practice of private prayer that the Septennial Sacrifice of the Maidens
might be dispensed with; and when during the actual year of the
Septennial Festival Earle had unexpectedly appeared, wearing an amulet
bearing the "sign" of Kuhlacan, and demanding admission to Ulua, it is
not to be wondered at if all who were in any way interested in the
burning question should regard his appearance as, in one form or
another, an answer to their petition. Whether that answer was to be in
the affirmative or the negative was what everybody, and especially
Zorah, were now particularly anxious to learn.

For Earle, with his as yet imperfect knowledge of the Uluan tongue to
get a clear comprehension of a somewhat intricate case, took some time,
and taxed Kedah's ingenuity to its utmost extent; but Kedah happened to
be a vitally interested party, and believing, in common with everybody
else, that Earle was in some mysterious fashion, either the incarnation
of Kuhlacan, or an ambassador and representative of the god,