class="c4">This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the trees bare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the land without destroying the dykes or drowning the lowing cattle and the little naked children who played at the river's bank; when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder brother, the Sun.

LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!

VASANTASENA was the girl's name, and she came to young King Vikramavati's court on the tenth day of the dark half of the month Bhadra. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her henna-stained feet bound together by a thin, golden chain, her white hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the tamala flower, in sign of mourning for Dharma, her father, the king of the south, who had fallen in battle beneath the steel-shod tusks of the war elephants.

She knelt before the peacock throne, and Vikramavati saw that her face was as beautiful as the moon on the fourteenth day, that her black locks were like female snakes, her waist like the waist of a she-lion, her arms like twin marble columns blue-veined, her skin like the sweetly scented champaka flower, and her breasts as the young tinduka fruit.

He looked into her eyes and saw that they were of a deep bronze color, gold flecked, and with pupils that were black and opaque—eyes that seemed to hold all the wisdom, all the secret mockery, the secret knowledge of womanhood—and his hand trembled, and he thought in his soul that the bountiful hand of Sravanna, the God of Plenty, had been raised high in the western heaven at the hour of her birth.

"Remember the words of the Brahmin," grumbled Deo Singh, his old prime minister who had served his father before him and who was watching him anxiously, jealously. "'Woman is the greatest robber of all. For other robbers steal property which is spiritually worthless, such as gold and diamonds; while woman steals the best—a man's heart, and soul, and ambition, and strength.' Remember, furthermore, the words of—"

"Enough croakings for the day, Leaky-Tongue!" cut in Vikramavati, with the insolent rashness of his twenty-four years. "Go home to your withered beldame of a wife and pray with her before the altar of unborn children, and help her clean the household pots. This is the season when I speak of love!"

"Whose love—yours or the girl's?" smilingly asked Madusadan, captain of horse, a man ten years the king's senior, with a mocking, bitter eye, a great, crimson mouth, a crunching chest, massive, hairy arms, the honey of eloquence on his tongue, and a mind that was a deer in leaping, a cat in climbing. Men disliked him because they could not beat him in joust or tournament; and women feared him because the purity of his life, which was an open book, gave the lie to his red lips and the slow-eddying flame in his hooded, brown eyes. "Whose love, wise king?"

But the latter did not hear.

He dismissed the soldiers and ministers and courtiers with an impatient gesture, and stepped down from his peacock throne.

"Fool!" said Madusadan, as he looked through a slit in the curtain from an inner room and saw that the king was raising Vasantasena to her feet; saw, too, the derisive patience in her golden eyes.

"A fool—though a king versed in statecraft!" he whispered into the ear of Shivadevi, Vasantasena's shriveled, gnarled hill nurse who had followed her mistress into captivity.

"Thee! A fool indeed!" cackled the old nurse as, side by side with the captain of horse, she listened to the tale of love the king was spreading before the slave girl's narrow, white feet, as Kama-Deva, the young God of Passion, spread the tale of his longing before Rati, his wife, with the voice of the cuckoo, the humming-bee in mating time, and the southern breeze laden with lotus.

"You came to me a slave captured among the crackling spears of battle," said Vikramavati, "and behold, it is I who am the slave. For your sake I would sin the many sins. For the sake of one of your precious eyelashes I would spit on the names of the gods and slaughter the holy cow. You are a light shining in a dark house. Your body is a garden of strange and glorious flowers which I gather in the gloom. I feel the savor and shade of your dim tresses, and think of the home land where the hill winds sweep.

"My love for you is as the soft sweetness of wild honey which the bees of the forest have gathered among the perfumed asoka flowers—sweet and warm, but with a sharp after-taste to prick the tongue and set the body eternally longing. To hold you I would throw a noose around the far stars. I give you all I have, all I am, all I shall ever be, and it would not be the thousandth part of my love for you. See! My heart is a carpet for your little lisping feet. Step gently, child!"

Vasantasena replied never a word. With unwinking, opaque eyes, she stared beyond the king, at a slit in the curtain which separated the throne-room from the inner apartment. For through the embroidered folds of the brocade, a great, hairy, brown, high-veined hand was thrust, the broad thumb wagging mockingly, meaningly, like a shadow of fate.

And she remembered the huge star sapphire set in hammered silver that twinkled on the thumb like a cresset of passion. She remembered how that hand had plucked her from amidst the horse's trampling feet and the sword-rimmed wheels of the war-chariots as she crouched low above her father's body. She remembered the voice that had come to her, clear through the clamor and din of battle, the braying of the conches, the neighing of the stallions, the shrill, angry trumpeting of the elephants—

A voice sharp, compelling, bitter—

"Captive to my bow and spear, little flower, but a slave for the king, my master. For such is the law of Hind. He will love you—not being altogether a fool. But perhaps you will not love him. Being but a stammering virgin boy, perhaps he will heap your lap with all the treasures in the world. Being an honest gentleman, perhaps he will treat you with respect and tenderness, with the sweet fairness of the blessed gods. And perhaps—even then—you will not love him, little flower.

"Perhaps you will turn to the captain of horse as the moon rises like a bubble of passion from the deep red of the sunset. Perhaps you will read the meaning of the koel-bird's love-cry, the secret of the jessamine's scent, the sweet, throbbing, winglike call of all the unborn children in the heart and body and soul of Madusadan, captain of horse."

"A bold man, this captain of horse!" Vasantasena had smiled through her tears, through the savage clang of battle.

"A reckless man—yet a humble man, little flower. Reckless and humble as the moist spring monsoon that sweeps over the young shoots of bluish-white rice. For"—here he had put her in front of him, on the curve of the peaked, bossed saddle—"will the rice ripen to the touch of the savage, clamoring monsoon?"

And he had drawn slightly away from her. He had not even kissed her, though they were shielded from all the world by the folds of the great battle flag that was stiff with gold, stiffer with darkening gore. In the fluttering heart of Vasantasena rose a great