eternal hills. The ripple of the streamlet in these palace halls revived a half-forgotten music of the heart that had once responded to the gurgle of a brook.

[Pg 21]

CONTENTS

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

The sympathies that had once been in unison with the rustling thicket stirred into more definite life [Pg 22]when an artificial breeze swept by and stirred the heavy foliage of rare plants. He had caught in other days notes of Nature's vast melody. Stray notes were here made to beat to a smaller measure. Thus Art interprets Nature. It was not The Song, but a light and pleasant carol, which pleased the sense of many, and to the ear of the few brought a haunting pain of which they did not know the meaning. Such a one only sighed and said:

[Pg 22]

"In a former birth I was great and good, and my life was sublime. The ghost of its memory has touched me."

[Pg 23]

But the loveliest of Lehna Singh's possessions was Moti, his daughter and only child, the fame of whose beauty had even reached Atmâ in his mountain home. Of her he had dreamt through boyhood's [Pg 24]years, and a happy consciousness of her proximity foreshadowed the enchanted hour when he was to behold her and own that his fondest fancies were to her loveliness as darkness to noonday. Her name he had heard whispered in the gay throng of her father's guests, on the memorable first evening of his arrival there; but, strange to tell, next day, when these first hours in a palace seemed to his excited imagination a dream in which mingled in wildest confusion the glitter of diamonds, the perfume of a thousand flowers, the revel of dazzling colors, the bewildering music of unknown instruments, and the intoxication of wonder and bliss, there rang through all only one articulate voice, sounding as if from some leafy ambush amid vague laughter and murmurs of speech, saying:

[Pg 24]

"But I tell you that Rajah Lal Singh means to pluck the rose of Lehna Singh's garden!"

[Pg 25]CHAPTER IV.

[Pg 25]

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