board and clung with both hands to the seat. One wheel ceased to
touch the gravel as they whirled along a semicircular drive. Suddenly
the mare drew up on her haunches, under the porch of a pretentious
residence. Sentries saluted. The sais swung down. In less than
sixty seconds King was following the general through a wide entrance
into a crowded hall. The instant the general's fat figure darkened
the doorway twenty men of higher rank than King, native and English,
rose from lined-up chairs and pressed forward.

"Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!" He waved them aside
with a little apologetic gesture. "Come in here, King."

King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them
on rubber jambs.

"Sit down!"

The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the
papers in it. In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber
bands, with a faded photograph face-upward on the top.

"That's the woman! How d'you like the look of her?"

King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness
of a woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her
witchery has become a proverb. She was dressed as a dancing woman,
yet very few dancing women could afford to be dressed as she was.

King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with
many dancing women in the course of duty; but as he stared at