Next day the palace was a-buzz with my feast, for I had put Taiwun and all his champions snoring on the mats and walked unaided to my bed.  Never, in the days of vicissitude that came later, did Taiwun doubt my claim of Korean birth.  Only a Korean, he averred, could possess so strong a head.

The palace was a city in itself, and we were lodged in a sort of summer-house that stood apart.  The princely quarters were mine, of course, and Hamel and Maartens, with the rest of the grumbling cunies, had to content themselves with what remained.

I was summoned before Yunsan, the Buddhist priest I have mentioned.  It was his first glimpse of me and my first of him.  Even Kim he dismissed from me, and we sat alone on deep mats in a twilight room.  Lord, Lord, what a man and a mind was Yunsan!  He made to probe my soul.  He knew things of other lands and places that no one in Cho-Sen dreamed to know.  Did he believe my fabled birth?  I could not guess, for his face was less changeful than a bowl of bronze.

What Yunsan’s thoughts were only Yunsan knew.  But in him, this poor-clad, lean-bellied priest, I sensed the power behind power in all the palace and in all Cho-Sen.  I sensed also, through the drift of speech, that he had use of me.  Now was this use suggested by the Lady Om?—­a nut I gave Hendrik Hamel to crack.  I little knew, and less I cared, for I lived always in the moment and let others forecast, forfend, and travail their anxiety.

I answered, too, the summons of the Lady Om, following a sleek-faced, cat-footed eunuch through quiet palace byways to her apartments.  She lodged as a princess of the blood should lodge.  She, too, had a palace to herself, among lotus ponds where grow forests of trees centuries old but so dwarfed that they reached no higher than my middle.  Bronze bridges, so delicate and rare that they looked as if fashioned by jewel-smiths, spanned her lily ponds, and a bamboo grove screened her palace apart from all the palace.

My head was awhirl.  Sea-cuny that I was, I was no dolt with women, and I sensed more than idle curiosity in her sending for me.  I had heard love-tales of common men and queens, and was a-wondering if now it was my fortune to prove such tales true.

The Lady Om wasted little time.  There were women about her, but she regarded their presence no more than a carter his horses.  I sat beside her on deep mats that made the room half a couch, and wine was given me and sweets to nibble, served on tiny, foot-high tables inlaid with pearl.

Lord, Lord, I had but to look into her eyes—­But wait.  Make no mistake.  The Lady Om was no fool.  I have said she was of my own age.  All of thirty she was, with the poise of her years.  She knew what she wanted.  She knew what she did not want.  It was because of this she had never married, although all pressure that an Asiatic court could put upon a woman had been vainly put upon