Now and then glass bracelets tinkled from behind the screen; ever and again the music stopped, until another girl appeared to play another melancholy air.  But the even purring of the fans went on incessantly, and the poor, priest-ridden fool who owned it all scowled straight in front of him, his brows lined deep in thought.

It is a strange malady, that which seizes men whom fate has elevated to a throne.  It acts as certain Indian drugs are known to do—­deprives its victim of the power to act, but intensifies his ability to think, and theorize, and feel.  Howrah, with untold treasure in his vaults, with an army of five thousand men, with the authority and backing that a hundred generations give, could long for more—­could fear the loss of what he did have—­but could not act.

The priests held him fear-bound.  His brother held him hate-bound.  His women—­and not even he knew, probably, how many of them languished in the secret warren inside those palace walls—­kept him restless in a net of this-and-that-way-tugged intrigue.  Flattery—­and that is by far the subtlest poison of the East—­blinded him utterly to his own best course, and kept him blind.  Luxury unmanned him; he who had once held the straightest spear in western India, and for the love of feeling red blood racing in his veins had ridden down panthers on the maidan, was flabby now; deep, dark rings underlined his eyes and the once steel-sinewed wrist trembled.

His brother Jaimihr in his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights, would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside—­butchered any who opposed him—­pressed into service those who merely lagged—­and would have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to themselves.  But Jaimihr had to stalk lesser game and content himself with pricking at the ever-growing hate that gradually rendered the Maharajah decisionless and sorry only for himself.

A first glimpse at Howrah, particularly in the shaded room, showed a handsome man, black-bearded, lean, and lithe; a second look, undazzled by his jewelry or by the studied magnificence of each apparently unstudied movement, betrayed a man whose lightest word was law, but who feared to give the word.  Where muscles had been were unfilled folds of skin that shook; where a firm if selfish mouth had once smiled merrily beneath a pointed black mustache, a mouth still smiled, but meanly; the selfishness was there, but the firmness had faded.

His eyes, though, were his most marked feature.  They were hungry eyes, pathetic as a caged beast’s and as savage.  No one could see them without pitying him, and no man in his senses would have accepted their owner’s word on any point at all.  A man looks as he did when the fire of a burning velt has circled him and there is no way out.  There was fear behind them, and the look of restless search for safety that is nowhere.