her to compel her to marry Chong Mong-ju.  He was a lesser cousin of the great Min family, himself no fool, and grasping so greedily for power as to perturb Yunsan, who strove to retain all power himself and keep the palace and Cho-Sen in ordered balance.  Thus Yunsan it was who in secret allied himself with the Lady Om, saved her from her cousin, used her to trim her cousin’s wings.  But enough of intrigue.  It was long before I guessed a tithe of it, and then largely through the Lady Om’s confidences and Hendrik Hamel’s conclusions.

The Lady Om was a very flower of woman.  Women such as she are born rarely, scarce twice a century the whole world over.  She was unhampered by rule or convention.  Religion, with her, was a series of abstractions, partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself.  Vulgar religion, the public religion, she held, was a device to keep the toiling millions to their toil.  She had a will of her own, and she had a heart all womanly.  She was a beauty—­yes, a beauty by any set rule of the world.  Her large black eyes were neither slitted nor slanted in the Asiatic way.  They were long, true, but set squarely, and with just the slightest hint of obliqueness that was all for piquancy.

I have said she was no fool.  Behold!  As I palpitated to the situation, princess and sea-cuny and love not a little that threatened big, I racked my cuny’s brains for wit to carry the thing off with manhood credit.  It chanced, early in this first meeting, that I mentioned what I had told all the Court, that I was in truth a Korean of the blood of the ancient house of Koryu.

“Let be,” she said, tapping my lips with her peacock fan.  “No child’s tales here.  Know that with me you are better and greater than of any house of Koryu.  You are . . .”

She paused, and I waited, watching the daring grow in her eyes.

“You are a man,” she completed.  “Not even in my sleep have I ever dreamed there was such a man as you on his two legs upstanding in the world.”

Lord, Lord! and what could a poor sea-cuny do?  This particular sea-cuny, I admit, blushed through his sea tan till the Lady Om’s eyes were twin pools of roguishness in their teasing deliciousness and my arms were all but about her.  And she laughed tantalizingly and alluringly, and clapped her hands for her women, and I knew that the audience, for this once, was over.  I knew, also, there would be other audiences, there must be other audiences.

Back to Hamel, my head awhirl.

“The woman,” said he, after deep cogitation.  He looked at me and sighed an envy I could not mistake.  “It is your brawn, Adam Strang, that bull throat of yours, your yellow hair.  Well, it’s the game, man.  Play her, and all will be well with us.  Play her, and I shall teach you how.”

I bristled.  Sea-cuny I was, but I was man, and to no man would I be beholden in my way with women.  Hendrik Hamel might be one time part-owner of the old Sparwehr, with a navigator’s knowledge of the stars and deep versed in books, but with women, no, there I would not give him better.