balls.  In the corners, under canopies, are seated fortune-tellers, busy casting horoscopes.  It is a veritable riot of colour, with never a discordant note.

Through the crowd the king passes alone and unrecognised, and disappears through double doors of heavily carved teak wood.  He has hardly passed when mah phru, a very lovely girl, enters in distress.  She whispers that she desires an audience of the King who has come amongst them.  The few who hear her shrug their shoulders, smile, and pass on.  They are incredulous.  She goes from group to group, but the people turn from her with disdain.  Then the great doors open, and the king is seen.  The girl throws herself, Oriental fashion, in his path.  Her beauty and her pathos arrest his attention and he waves aside those who would interfere.  She implores the king’s protection.  She is willing to be his slave.  He listens with deep attention.  She explains that since her father’s death she has been continuously persecuted by the village people

on the double count of her Italian blood and her poverty.

The girl invites him to come to her hut in the forest and verify what she says.  With a gesture he signifies that he will follow where she leads.  She rises.  The crowd gathers round—all are hushed to silence.  the king, as one entranced, puts aside all who would in any way interfere.  The girl precedes him, going from the Pagoda towards the night.  When she reaches the great staircase, she beckons, Oriental fashion, with downward hand.  The scene should, in grouping and colour, make for rare beauty.

SCENE III

A humble dhunni-thatched hut, set amidst the whispering grandeur of the jungle, with its mighty trees, its trackless paths, its indescribable silence.  The curtain discovers mah phru and the king, who expresses his amazement at the loneliness and the poverty of her lot.  She explains that poverty is not what frightens her, but the enmity of those who live yonder, and who make it almost impossible for her to sell her cucumbers or her pineapples.  the king’s gaze never leaves the face or figure of the girl.  He declares that he will protect her—that he

will build her a home here in the shadow of the loneliness around them.  He has two years of an unfettered freedom—for those years he can command his life.  He loves her, he desires her—they will find a Paradise together.  The girl trembles with joy—with fear—with surprise.  “And after two years?” she asks.  “Death,” he answers.

ACT II

SCENE I

The jungle once more.  Time: noonday.  In place of the hut is a building, half Burmese, half Italian villa, of white Chunam, with curled roofs rising on roofs, gilded and