“Search for what?” demanded Tripe.

“For anything!  For everything!  Search the cellar; search the garden; search the roof!  Are You a fool?  Are you fit for my employment?  Then search the house, and report to me anything unusual that you find in it!  Go!”

After several stiff brandies and soda Gungadhura then conceived a plan that might have been dangerous supposing Yasmini to have been less alert, and supposing that she really knew the secret.  He spent an evening coaching Patali, his favorite dancing girl, and then sent her to Yasmini with almost full powers to drive a bargain.  She might offer as much as half of the treasure to Yasmini provided Gungadhura should receive the other half and the British should know nothing.  That was the one point on which Patali’s orders permitted no discretion.  The whole transaction must be secret from the British.

Reporting the encounter afterward to her employer Patali hardly seemed proud of her share in it.  All the information she brought back was to the effect that Yasmini denied all knowledge of the treasure, and all desire to possess it.

“I think she knows nothing.  She said very little to me.  She laughed at the idea of bargaining with Englishmen.  She said you are welcome to the treasure, maharajah sahib, and that if she should ever find its hiding-place she will certainly tell you.  She plays the part of a woman whose spirit is already broken and who is weary of India.”

Having a very extensive knowledge of dancing girls and their ways, Gungadhura did not believe much more than two per cent. of Patali’s account of what had taken place, and he was right, except that he grossly overestimated her truthfulness.  And even with his experienced cynicism it never entered his head to suppose that Patali was the individual who warned Yasmini in advance of the preparations being made to poison her by Gungadhura’s orders.  Yet, as it was Patali’s own sister who made the sweetmeats, and tampered with the charcoal for the filter, and put the powdered diamonds in the chutney, it was likely enough that Patali would know the facts; and as for motives, dancing girls don’t have them.  They fear, they love, they desire, they seek to please.  If Yasmini could pluck heart-strings more cleverly than Gungadhura could break and bruise them, so much the worse for Gungadhura’s plans, that was all, as far as Patali was concerned.

For several days after that, as Yasmini more than hinted in her letter to Tess, repeated efforts were made to administer poison in the careful undiscoverable ways that India has made her own since time immemorial.  But you can not easily poison any one who does not eat, and who drinks wine that was bottled in Europe; or at any rate, to do it you must call in experts who are expensive in the first place as well as adepts at blackmail in the second.  Yasmini enjoyed a charmed life and an increasing appetite, Gungadhura’s guards attending to it however, that she took no more forbidden walks and rides and swims by moonlight to make the hunger really unendurable.  Supplies were allowed to pass through the palace gate, after they had been tampered with.