ers whom none may know but whose secret power any man may
feel--could be heard like caged birds crowding on their perches.

Now and then glass bracelets tinkled from behind the screen; ever and
again the music stopped, until another girl appeared to play another
melancholy air. But the even purring of the fans went on incessantly,
and the poor, priest-ridden fool who owned it all scowled straight in
front of him, his brows lined deep in thought.

It is a strange malady, that which seizes men whom fate has elevated to
a throne. It acts as certain Indian drugs are known to do--deprives its
victim of the power to act, but intensifies his ability to think, and
theorize, and feel. Howrah, with untold treasure in his vaults, with an
army of five thousand men, with the authority and backing that a hundred
generations give, could long for more--could fear the loss of what he
did have--but could not act.

The priests held him fear-bound. His brother held him hate-bound. His
women--and not even he knew, probably, how many of them languished in
the secret warren inside those palace walls--kept him restless in a net
of this-and-that-way-tugged intrigue. Flattery--and that is by far the
subtlest poison of the East--blinded him utterly to his own best course,
and kept him blind. Luxury unmanned him; he who had once held the
straightest spear in western India, and for the love of feeling red
blood racing in his veins had ridden down panthers on the maidan,
was flabby now; deep, dark rings underlined his eyes and the once
steel-sinewed wrist trembled.

His brother Jaimihr in his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights,
would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside--butchered any
who opposed him--pressed into service those who merely lagged--and would
have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time
to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to
themselves. But Jaimihr had to stalk lesser game and content himself
with pricking at the ever-growing hate that gradually rendered the
Maharajah decisionless and sorry only for himself.

A first glimpse at Howrah, particularly in the shaded room, showed a
handsome man, black-bearded, lean, and lithe; a second look, undazzled
by his jewelry or by the studied magnificence of each apparently
unstudied movement, betrayed a man whose lightest word was law, but who
feared to give the word. Where muscles had been were unfilled folds of
skin tha