eacock throne.

"Fool!" said Madusadan, as he looked through a slit in the curtain from
an inner room and saw that the king was raising Vasantasena to her feet;
saw, too, the derisive patience in her golden eyes.

"A fool--though a king versed in statecraft!" he whispered into the ear
of Shivadevi, Vasantasena's shriveled, gnarled hill nurse who had
followed her mistress into captivity.

"Thee! A fool indeed!" cackled the old nurse as, side by side with the
captain of horse, she listened to the tale of love the king was
spreading before the slave girl's narrow, white feet, as Kama-Deva, the
young God of Passion, spread the tale of his longing before Rati, his
wife, with the voice of the cuckoo, the humming-bee in mating time, and
the southern breeze laden with lotus.

"You came to me a slave captured among the crackling spears of battle,"
said Vikramavati, "and behold, it is I who am the slave. For your sake I
would sin the many sins. For the sake of one of your precious eyelashes
I would spit on the names of the gods and slaughter the holy cow. You
are a light shining in a dark house. Your body is a garden of strange
and glorious flowers which I gather in the gloom. I feel the savor and
shade of your dim tresses, and think of the home land where the hill
winds sweep.

"My love for you is as the soft sweetness of wild honey which the bees
of the forest have gathered among the perfumed asoka flowers--sweet and
warm, but with a sharp after-taste to prick the tongue and set the body
eternally longing. To hold you I would throw a noose around the far
stars. I give you all I have, all I am, all I shall ever be, and it
would not be the thousandth part of my love for you. See! My heart is a
carpet for your little lisping feet. Step gently, child!"

Vasantasena replied never a word. With unwinking, opaque eyes, she
stared beyond the king, at a slit in the curtain which separated the
throne-room from the inner apartment. For through the embroidered folds
of the brocade, a great, hairy, brown, high-veined hand was thrust, the
broad thumb wagging mockingly, meaningly, like a shadow of fate.

And she remembered the huge star sapphire set in hammered silver that
twinkled on the thumb like a cresset of passion. She remembered how that
hand had plucked her from amidst the horse's trampling feet and the
sword-rimmed wheels of the war-chariots as she crouched low above her
father's body. She remembered the voice that had come to