Groves of the feathery bamboo drooped their delicate
stems in the fervent, sweet-scented heat, over the white,
thick-lipped lilies, from one to other of which passed languidly
on velvet wings great purple butterflies.

The pomegranate trees made a fine parade of their small, exquisite
scarlet flowers, and pushed them upwards into the sparkling
sunlight through the veils of white starry blossoms of the
jessamine that climbed over and trailed from every tree in the
compound.

The girl went forward dreaming. How completely, superbly happy she
was! And she had nothing but the gifts of Nature, such as she, the
kindly one, gives to the gay bird swinging on the bough, the
butterfly on the flower, the deer springing on the hills: health
and youth, beauty and love.

These only were hers; nothing that man ordinarily strives
for--neither wealth nor fame, fine houses, costly garments, jewels,
slaves, power; none of these were hers. Over her body hung simply a
muslin tunic worth a few annas; of the garden in which she stood
not a flower belonged to her, no weight of jewels lay on her happy
heart. She had no name; she was only a dancing-girl from the
Deccan. With the animals she shared that wonderful kingdom of joy
that they possess: their food and mate secured, their vigorous
health bounding in their limbs, their beauty radiant in their
perfect bodies.

Are they not the Lords of Creation in the sense that they are lords
of joy? Man is the slave of the earth, doomed by his own vile lusts
to bondage of the most dismal kind. All of those gifts that Nature
gives, and from which alone can be drawn happiness, he tramples
beneath his feet, putting his neck under the yoke of ceaseless
toil, striving for things which in the end bring neither peace nor
joy.

All within the compound under the reign of Nature rejoiced. The
parroquets swung on the trees, and the butterflies floated from the
marble whiteness of the lily's cloisters to the deep, warm recesses
of the rose, and the dancing-girl walked singing through the
sparkling, scented air thinking of her lord.

Hamilton, speeding down the dusty, burning road to his office in
the native city, felt a strange bounding of his heart as his
thoughts clung to the low, white bungalow amongst the palms
outside the station, and all that it held for him.

He went through his work that day with a wonderful energy, born of
the new life within him. Nothing fatigued, nothing worried him. The
cour