her.  He just said:  “What is she like?  Is she tall or short, fair or dark?” The barber answered the questions readily.  Then he went on to say that it was easy to see that the lady was as clever as she was beautiful; for she knew not only all about animals but also about plants.  “Every day,” he said, “she gathers quantities of herbs, and I have been told she makes healing medicines of them.  Some even go so far as to say she also makes poisons.  But, for my part, I do not believe that; she is too beautiful to be wicked.”

The king listened, and a tiny little doubt crept into his mind about his wife.  She had never told him about the herbs she gathered, although she often chattered about her friends in the forest.  Perhaps after all it was not Kadali-Garbha the barber was talking about.  He would ask her if she knew anything about making medicines from herbs.  He did so when they were alone together, and she said at once, “Oh, yes!  My father taught me.  But I have never made any since I was married.”

“Are you sure?” asked the king; and she answered laughing, “Of course, I am:  how could I be anything but sure?  I have no need to think of medicine-making, now I am the queen.”

Dridha-Varman said no more at the time.  But he was troubled; and when the barber came again, he began at once to ask about the woman who had been seen in the woods.  The wicked man was delighted, and made up a long story.  He said one of the waiting women had told him of what she had seen.  The woman, he said, had followed the lady home one day, and that home was not far from the palace.  She had seen her bending over a fire above which hung a great sauce-pan full of water, into which she flung some of the herbs she had gathered, singing as she did so, in a strange language.

“Could it possibly be,” thought the king, “that Kadali-Garbha had deceived him?  Was she perhaps a witch after all?” He remembered that he really did not know who she was, or who her father was.  He had loved her directly he saw her, just because she was so beautiful.  What was he to do now?  He was quite sure, from the description the barber had given of the woman in the forest, that she was his wife.  He would watch her himself in future, and say nothing to her that would make her think he was doing so.

11.  What should the king have done when he heard the barber’s story?

12.  Can you really love anybody truly whom you do not trust?

CHAPTER VII

Although the king said nothing to his wife about what the barber had told him, he could not treat her exactly as he did before he heard it, and she very soon began to wonder what she had done to vex him.  The first thing she noticed was that one of the ladies of the court always followed her when she went into the forest.  She did not like this; because she so dearly loved to be alone with the wild creatures, and they did