the heel of the succeeding prince, a nephew of her husband, unenamored
of foreigners and avowedly determined to enforce on his uncle's widow
the Indian custom of seclusion.

But the British took the charitable view, that covering a multitude of sins.
It was not bad policy to convert the erstwhile Sonia Omanoff from secret
enemy to grateful friend, and the feat was easy.

The new maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an
ancient palace for the Russian widow's use; and there, almost within
sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini had
her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western outrage
and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her Eastern heritage
by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and livelihood it is to
fish the troubled waters of the courts of minor kings.

All these things Yasmini told me in that scented chamber of another
palace, in which a wrathful government secluded her in later years for
its own peace as it thought, but for her own recuperation as it happened.
She told me many other things besides that have some little bearing
on this story but that, if all related, would crowd the book too full. The
real gist of them is that she grew to love India with all her heart and India
repaid her for it after its own fashion, which is manyfold and marvelous.

There is no fairer land on earth than that far northern slice of Rajputana,
nor a people more endowed with legend and the consciousness of
ancestry. They have a saying that every Rajput is a king's son, and every
Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere
that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and
women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped