Last, and most uncomfortable crime of all, it seemed that she had now arranged with Samson to have English ladies call on her at intervals.  Not a prophet on earth could guess where that might lead to, and to what extremes of Western fashion; for though one does not see the high-caste women of Rajputana, they themselves see everything and know all that is going on.  But it needed no prophet to explain that a woman visited at intervals by the wives of English officers could not be murdered easily or safely.

All arguments pointed one way.  He must have it out with Yasmini in one battle royal.  If she should be willing to surrender, well and good.  He would make her pay for the past, but no doubt there were certain concessions that he could yield without loss of dignity.  If she knew the secret of the hiding-place of the treasure he would worm it out of her.  There are ways, he reflected, of worming secrets from a woman—­ways and means.  If she knew the secret and refused to tell, then he knew how to provide that she should never tell any one else.  If she had told some one else already,—­Samson, for instance, or Jinendra’s priest—­ then he would see to it that priest or commissioner, as the case might be, must carry on without the cleverest member of the firm.

But he must hurry.  Poison apparently would not work and he did not dare murder her outright, much as he would have liked to.  It was maddening to think how one not very violent blow with a club or a knife would put an end to her wilfulness forever, and yet that the risk to himself in that case would be almost as deadly as the certainty for her.  But accidents might happen.  In a land of elephants, tigers, snakes, wild boars and desperate men there is a wide range for circumstance, and the sooner the accident the less the risk of interference by some inquisitive English woman with a ticket-of-admission signed by Samson.

An “accident” in Yasmini’s palace, he decided would be nearly as risky as murder.  But he had a country-place fifty miles away in the mountains, to which she could be forcibly removed, thus throwing inquisitive Englishwomen off the scent for a while at any rate.  That secluded little hunting box stood by a purple lake that had already drowned its dozens, not always without setting up suspicion; and between the city of Sialpore and the “Nesting-place of Seven Swans” lay leagues of wild road on which anything at all might happen and be afterward explained away.

As for the forcible abduction, that could best be got around by obliging her to write a letter to himself requesting permission to visit the mountains for a change of air and scenery.  There were ways and means of obliging women to write letters.