surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been to send
a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very consciences
of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the veil and the
rustling curtain and religion hide woman's hand without in the least
suppressing her, that was a plan too easy of contrivance to be overlooked.

In those days there was a prince in Moscow whose public conduct so
embittered his young wife, and so notoriously, that when he was found
one morning murdered in his bed suspicion rested upon her. She was
tried in secret, as the custom was, found guilty and condemned to death.
Then, on the strength of influence too strong for the czar, the sentence
was commuted to the far more cruel one of life imprisonment in the
Siberian mines. While she awaited the dreaded march across Asia in
chains a certain proposal was made to the Princess Sonia Omanoff,
and no one who knew anything about it wondered that she accepted
without much hesitation.

Less than a month after her arrest she was already in Paris, squandering
paper rubles in the fashionable shops. And at the Russian Embassy
in Paris she made the acquaintance of the very first of the smaller Indian
potentates who made the "grand tour." Traveling abroad has since
become rather fashionable, and is even encouraged by the British-Indian
Government because there is no longer any plausible means of preventing it;
but Maharajah Bubru Singh was a pioneer, who dared greatly, and had
his way even against the objections of a high commissioner. In addition
he had had to defy the Brahman priests who, all unwilling, are the strong
supports of alien overrule; for they are armed with the iron-fanged laws
of caste that forbid crossing the sea, among innumerable other things.

Perhaps there was a hint of moral bravery behind the warrior eyes that