Finally Gungadhura, biting his nails and drinking whisky in the intervals between consultation with a dozen different sets of priests, made up his mind to drastic action.  It dawned on his exasperated mind that every single priest, including Jinendra’s obese incumbent, was trying to take advantage of his predicament in order to feather a priestly nest or forward plans diametrically opposed to his own. (Not that recognition of priestly deception made him less superstitious, or any less dependent on the priest; if that were the way discovery worked, all priests would have vanished long ago.  It simply made him furious, like a tiger in a net, and spurred him to wreak damage in which the priests might have no hand.)

Whisky, drugs, reflection and the hints of twenty dancing girls convinced him that Jinendra’s priest especially was playing a double game; for what was there in the fat man’s mental ingredients that should anchor his loyalty to an ill-tempered prince, in case a princess of wit and youth and brilliant beauty should stake her cunning in the game?  Why was not Yasmini already ten times dead of poison?  Nothing but the cunning inspired by partnership with priests, and alertness born of secret knowledge, could have given her the intelligence to order her maids to boil a present of twenty pairs of French silk stockings—­nor the malice to hang them afterward with her own hands on a line across her palace roof in full view of Gungadhura’s window!

Hatred of Yasmini was an obsession of his in any case.  He had loathed her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be veiled.  Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable screens.  He was a stickler for that sort of thing and, like others of his kidney, rather proud of the rumors that no curtains could confine.  So he loathed and despised Yasmini even more than he had detested her mother, because she coupled to her mother’s Western notions about freedom a wholly Eastern ability to take advantage of restraint.  In other words she was too clever for him.

On top of all that she had dared outrage his royal feelings by refusing to be given in marriage to the husband be selected for her—­a fine, black-bristling, stout cavalier of sixty with a wife or two already and impoverished estates that would have swallowed Yasmini’s fortune nicely at a gulp.  Incidentally, the husband would have eagerly canceled a gambling debt in exchange for a young wife with an income.

There was no point at which Yasmini and himself could meet on less than rapier terms.  Her exploits in disguise were notorious—­so notorious that men sang songs about them in the drinking places and the khans.  And as if that were not bad enough there was a rumor lately that she had turned Abhisharika.  The word is Sanskrit and poetic.  To the ordinary folk, who like to listen to love-stories by moonlight on the roofs or under trees, that meant that she had chosen her own lover and would go to him, when the time should come, of her own free will.  To Gungadhura, naturally, such a word bore other meanings.  As we have said, he was a stickler for propriety.