The last was barely audible, for by this time the ki-sang had stuffed his mouth to speechlessness.

As I have said, I had the will and the fearlessness, and I racked my sea-cuny brains for the wit.  A palace eunuch, tickling my neck with a feather from behind, gave me my start.  I had already drawn attention by my aloofness and imperviousness to the attacks of the ki-sang, so that many were looking on at the eunuch’s baiting of me.  I gave no sign, made no move, until I had located him and distanced him.  Then, like a shot, without turning head or body, merely by my arm I fetched him an open, back-handed slap.  My knuckles landed flat on his cheek and jaw.  There was a crack like a spar parting in a gale.  He was bowled clean over, landing in a heap on the floor a dozen feet away.

There was no laughter, only cries of surprise and murmurings and whisperings of “Yi Yong-ik.”  Again I folded my arms and stood with a fine assumption of haughtiness.  I do believe that I, Adam Strang, had among other things the soul of an actor in me.  For see what follows.  I was now the most significant of our company.  Proud-eyed, disdainful, I met unwavering the eyes upon me and made them drop, or turn away—­all eyes but one.  These were the eyes of a young woman, whom I judged, by richness of dress and by the half-dozen women fluttering at her back, to be a court lady of distinction.  In truth, she was the Lady Om, princess of the house of Min.  Did I say young?  She was fully my own age, thirty, and for all that and her ripeness and beauty a princess still unmarried, as I was to learn.

She alone looked me in the eyes without wavering until it was I who turned away.  She did not look me down, for there was neither challenge nor antagonism in her eyes—­only fascination.  I was loth to admit this defeat by one small woman, and my eyes, turning aside, lighted on the disgraceful rout of my comrades and the trailing ki-sang and gave me the pretext.  I clapped my hands in the Asiatic fashion when one gives command.

“Let be!” I thundered in their own language, and in the form one addressee underlings.

Oh, I had a chest and a throat, and could bull-roar to the hurt of ear-drums.  I warrant so loud a command had never before cracked the sacred air of the Emperor’s palace.

The great room was aghast.  The women were startled, and pressed toward one another as for safety.  The ki-sang released the cunies and shrank away giggling apprehensively.  Only the Lady Om made no sign nor motion but continued to gaze wide-eyed into my eyes which had returned to hers.

Then fell a great silence, as if all waited some word of doom.  A multitude of eyes timidly stole back and forth from the Emperor to me and from me to the Emperor.  And I had wit to keep the silence and to stand there, arms folded, haughty and remote.

“He speaks our language,” quoth the Emperor at the last; and I swear there was such a relinquishment of held breaths that the whole room was one vast sigh.