Yasmini had ordered him to report to the maharajah a chance encounter with an individual named Gunga Singh.  Accordingly he did.  Asked who Gunga Singh was, he replied he did not know.  She had told him to say that Gunga Singh said the Princess Yasmini was at the commissioner’s house; so he told the maharajah that and nothing further.  Gungadhura sent two men immediately to make inquiries.  One drew the commissioner’s house blank, bribing a servant to let him search the place in Samson’s absence; the other met the commissioner himself, and demanded of him point-blank what he had been doing with the princess.  The question was so bluntly put and the man’s attitude so impudent that Samson lost his temper and couched his denial in blunt bellicose bad language.  The vehemence convinced the questioner that he was lying, as the maharajah was shortly informed.  So the fact became established beyond the possibility of refutation that Yasmini had been closeted with Samson for several hours that morning.

Remained, of course, to consider why she had gone to him and what might result from her visit; and up to a certain point, and in certain cases accurate guessing is easier than might be expected for either side to a political conundrum, in India, ample provision having been made for it by all concerned.

The English are fond of assuring strangers and one another that spying is “un-English”; that it “isn’t done, you know, old top”; and the surest way of heaping public scorn and indignation on the enemies of England is to convict them, correctly or otherwise, of spying on England secretly.  So it would be manifestly libelous, ungentlemanly and proof conclusive of crass ignorance to assert that Samson in his capacity of commissioner employed spies to watch Gungadhura Singh.  He had no public fund from which to pay spies.  If you don’t believe that, then ponder over a copy of the Indian Estimates.  Every rupee is accounted for.

The members of the maharajah’s household who came to see Samson at more or less frequent intervals were individuals of the native community whom he encouraged to intimacy for ethnological and social reasons.  When they gave him information about Gungadhura’s doings, that was merely because they were incurably addicted to gossip; as a gentleman, and in some sense a representative of His Majesty the King, he would not dream, of course, of paying attention to any such stuff; but one could not, of course, be so rude and high-handed as to stop their talking even if it did tend toward an accurate foreknowledge of the maharajah’s doings that was hardly “cricket.”

As for money, certainly none changed hands.  The indisputable fact that certain friends and relatives of certain members of the maharajah’s household enjoyed rather profitable contracts on British administered territory was coincidence.  Everybody knows how long is the arm of coincidence.  Well, then, so are its ears, and its tongue.