I sensed also, through the drift of speech, that he had use of me.

Now was this use suggested by the Lady Om ?--a nut I gave Hendrik Hamel to crack.

I little knew, and less I cared, for I lived always in the moment and let others forecast, forfend, and travail their anxiety.
I answered, too, the summons of the Lady Om, following a sleek-faced, cat- footed eunuch through quiet palace byways to her apartments.

She lodged as a princess of the blood should lodge.

She, too, had a palace to herself, among lotus ponds where grow forests of trees centuries old but so dwarfed that they reached no higher than my middle.