That self-same dawn Akbar the King sate alone, as he so often did, upon a large flat stone which lay in a lonely spot beside the Anup tank. He was dressed in the saffron sheet of an ascetic, and a fold of it, drawn across the lower part of the face, completely disguised him; though the few persons abroad at this early hour were not of the class from whom he could fear detection or even interruption--except perhaps a petition for a blessing. For this was the widows' hour; that strange hour in India, while the world still sleeps, when sorrowful womanhood works out the salvation of mankind. When dim, ghostlike in their white shrouding, figures creep out of the shadowy homes, burdened with the sins of men, and, after washing them away in the chill waters of dawn, creep back to the hearthstones, ere the sun rises upon the devoted drudgery of another widows' day.

The sight of these figures, the whole scene, unreal, mystical, had always had a fascination for Akbar, a curious almost angry interest. He felt himself helpless before it, King though he was. True! he had abolished suttee by a sweep of his pen. The swift cruel sacrifice of life he had checked; but this long-drawn agony was beyond him.

And what did it mean when all was said and done? His active mind, ever wrestling with problems of the psychic world, fought for a conclusion on this, the question which has puzzled so many inquirers.

"Whence and wherefore comes the sense of sin which in the woman lies ever at the root of sex, making her falsely modest or boldly brazen?"

How silent they were, these mateless, almost sexless bodies whose souls were seeking--through past Æons, and for endless centuries to come--salvation not for themselves but for their men folk! The very water slipped noiselessly over the shaven unveiled heads that slipped into it as noiselessly.

Sound only came when, on the red sandstone steps of the tank once more, they again drew their wet shrouds round youth and age alike.

Drip! Drip! Drip!

The water fell in blood-red tear drops beside the blood-red print of their bare feet upon the stones. A dolorous way indeed! a dolorous life.

A couple of gray-crested cranes, mates evidently, showed nestling side by side as they stood knee-deep in the gray levels of the tank; levels which brimmed up from the dim shadowy steps of the dim shadowy reflections in the water of the dim shadowy realities of stunted bushes and gnarled caper trees that rose against the dim gray of coming dawn.

Why was not humanity like the birds, accepting the Great Mystery of generation as differing not one whit from other functions of Life?

There lay the puzzle. What sin was it that the woman had committed in the dawn of days!

Yea! the dawn came fast! Below the distant verge of sight the bright-hued riders of the Day were galloping hard, each bringing his pennant to the battle of Light and Darkness.

Blue upon gray, violet tinting the blue, so passing to red, flaming to orange. Then with one throb of primrose----

Light!

He felt the thrill of it--that endless quiver of the ether waves passing on and on regardless of him, around him, through him, in him--felt it in a sudden answering shiver of nerve, and vein, and muscle, as he stood up, absorbed utterly in adoration.

"Thy blessing O my father!" came a voice beside him.

"May thy sacrifice be propitious O my daughter!" he replied mechanically.

"And may the King-of-Kings live forever! His slave kisses the dust of his footsteps."

He turned hastily, kingship coming back to him at once, to recognise Âtma Devi. Crouching at his feet, the wet folds of her widow's shroud clung to every curve of her supple body. After a night spent in fruitless inquiry she had come to the tank at the earliest point of dawn to wander fruitlessly in search round its shores; so after a hasty performance of her sacrifices, she was on her way cityward again when she had seen the solitary figure, and, guessing instinctively that it was the King--for his habits were known to all his people--had come to test her suspicion and so, perchance, gain direct speech of someone from whom, surely, she might hear the truth. But his first words checked her.

"I wist not, woman, thou wert widow," he said sternly. "As a rule thy dress----"

Thinking he blamed her--and blame from him meant all things--she was quick in explanation. "The Most-Auspicious is right," she almost interrupted, "but he to whom I was wedded as a babe proved vile; so my father--praise be to the Gods!--withheld me from him utterly. Yet these few years past, that the man's evil body is dead, I come hither to ransom his soul."

The answer fitting so aptly with Akbar's previous thoughts roused his instant curiosity.

"Wherefore?" he asked, his keen face lighting up with interest as he seated himself once more. "Sit yonder, sister, at my feet and tell me, wherefore?"

"Because he was my husband," came the almost aggressively quick reply. "And a wife is bound to her husband in Life and in Death."

Akbar smiled--the foibles of his world always amused him. "Not in Death, nowadays, my good woman," he cried lightly. "Akbar hath forbidden Death. Would that he could forbid this also."

He touched a fold of her wet shroud with his finger. A shiver shot heartwards from the contact. Was it merely the chill to his flesh warmed by his heart's blood, or was it--something he had told himself he had forgotten? He drew back in resentment. She also; but from his touch on what to her, as to most Hindu women, was the dearest privilege of her sex--the right to burn!

"The Most Excellent is a mighty King," she commented sarcastically, "but even he cannot stay the immortal man in woman from following man in death. We are not all cowards like she who sent yonder rÂm-rucki to the Most High."

She pointed with scorn to a slender, silken cord, behung with coloured tassels which the King wore on his wrist, bracelet fashion.

Akbar frowned.

"So. Thou knowest the story?"

"This slave knows all that concerns the Honour of the King," she replied proudly.

The frown grew.

"The King can keep his honour without thy help, woman! Aye! and his promises too; so this coward shall be saved." Then, as was so often the case with him, eager questioning swept away everything else. "Yet wherefore coward? Tell me that, thou, her sister in sex? Wherefore should a young girl not shrink from burning with an old profligate whose very age hath prevented natural fulfilment of husbandhood? By the sun, my very stomach turns at the thought of it; yet womanhood accepts it dutifully. Lo! couldst thou but tell me--but thou canst not--whence comes this sense of sin which makes women prostitute, and tempts men to be far worse than the beasts, I would give thee----." He paused, looking into her soft dark eyes whence the fierceness had died away giving place to wise surprise at ignorance.

"The Most Excellent must know," she replied. "Our mothers teach it to us. It is the love which seeks for pleasure, which forgets motherhood. Lo! in the beginning we were the nothingness which tempted form, even as SiyÂla the courtesan sang; so we cannot live save through that which we create. We are 'thieves of form, and sanctuaries of souls,' even as the Princess Sanyogata told PrithvirÂj. Aye! though she had lured him with the love that is illusion! But she was brave also. She left her womanhood to die, and followed the immortal in the man."

"Then this mortal love is woman's only?" he asked critically, eager as ever in argument.

"Aye!" she answered simply. "In the beginning it was so; but we have taught it to man; thus it returns to us again in every soul to which we give a body. Yea! it is so! Look how far we are, Most Excellent"--she pointed with slim finger to the distant cranes--"from yonder birds to whom pairing time is breeding time, who know not sex save for the life they have to give to the world."

She paused, and there was silence; for once again, the example she had chosen fitted in with past thoughts. Far away on the primrose verge a sword-shaped shaft of red-encircled cloud hid the rising sun.

"And there is no other Love?" he asked moodily, forgetful as ever of his entourage in the absorption of inquiry. Her face grew paler, her hand went up almost unconsciously to her throat round which the green stone of the rebeck player hung; but no essence of rose assailed her senses; or if it did she denied the fact strenuously.

"I know not, my King," she said quietly. "There be some who talk of it; but my father--he was very learned, Most High--held that Love, needing both subject and object" (she spoke quite simply of such abstruse idea as many a nigh naked coolie in India will do, if so be he is BrÂhmin), "lay outside the Great Unity and so was illusion. Yet to me----" she hesitated and looked at him almost appealingly out of her large, dark, unfathomable eyes. "Lo! I am woman, so I cannot think--wherefore should not Love be all things?"

"Wouldst thou have it so, sister?" he asked, meaningly. She flushed faintly under her dark skin.

"Nay! Most High," she replied proudly. "For me honour is enough, since I guard the King's."

The words held something of self-revelation in them. He rose and wound his saffron veil closer. "So be it, sister! Guard the King's honour, aye! and his Luck too if thou canst!" he added with a smile as he moved away.

The word roused her to a sense that her chance was departing; she caught at his feet and bowed herself over them in the attitude which in India brings arrest to all in authority; for it is ultimate appeal.

"What is it, sister?" he queried almost mechanically.

"What--what, Most Excellent, of the King's Luck?" she asked tremulously. At the moment other, clearer words failed her.

"What?" he echoed perplexedly, wondering what the woman would be at. "Naught that I know of save that it shone when I saw it yester-evening, and that it will shine still more when the Feringhi jeweller hath spent his Western art upon it," he added with a smile.

"Yester-even," she could scarce speak for surprise, "then--then it is not stolen? The King's Luck is safe?"

"Stolen! Ye Gods, no!" His look of wonder changed to kindly compassion. "Go home, my sister," he said as he might have said to a child. "And dream not so much of the King and his Luck. He is not worth it! So farewell! Yet stay! I owe thee something once more for--thy treatise on Love! I gave thee thy father's titular office did, I not? Well! to-morrow take up his duties! Come to the Great Durbar in thy ChÂran's dress, and, for once, a woman shall challenge the whole world for Akbar. Lo! it will make some of the durbaries see ShaÍtan," he interpolated for himself light-heartedly. "But come and fear not--I will warn the Chamberlain to give thee place. So once more farewell, widow----"

Thus far he had spoken with a smile; now his face grew grave. "Lo! despite Akbar, methinks thou wilt die for some man yet; thou art of that quality. Heaven send he be worth the sacrifice!"

"I will die for the King's honour if need be," she muttered, true by instinct to her life-idea, even in the midst of her mingled joy and amazement. She sate for some time after Akbar left her, trying to piece together the tangled clues she held; but such intricate balancing of facts was beyond her. She lived only by what she felt, so she was without guide in following up the actions of others.

That the diamond had been stolen she knew; and now it was evident that Birbal had kept the knowledge of the theft from the King--doubtless to save him from distress. This latter thought leapt to her heart and found instant harbour there, so that she began to reproach herself with having gone so near to making such forethought of no avail; a forethought that had done its work too, since as the Most High had seen the diamond but the evening before it must have been recovered. The incident was therefore over--small thanks to her!

And yet the King had bidden her challenge the whole world on his behalf! She crept home and looked at her father's corselet and sword wonderingly. How had it come about that the Great Hope of her life was about to be realised, and she could scarce feel any joy in it?

Meanwhile Akbar was doffing his ascetic's robe, and donning the heron-plumed turban of empire. It was a change to which he was accustomed; but this morning, he felt that something of his interview with Âtma Devi lingered with him.

He paused for a moment as he passed to the Private Hall of Audience with Birbal to look out across the palace courtyard and so through the Arch of Victory to India stretching wide and far beyond it.

"If I leave this place," he said quietly, "as leave it surely I shall some day, thus condemning myself to sonlessness, I shall go down to the ages as one who failed--who built dream-palaces unfit for humanity; therefore fit home for the bats, the foxes, the hyenas."

"This will I warrant, sire!" replied Birbal, hotly, in instant defence of his master. "Let who will come to Akbar's Arch of Triumph in the future, it shall remain to them unforgettable, unforgotten, until Death kills memory!"

"The memory of a great defeat," continued the King shaking his head. "And to my mind a greater one if I remain!" He turned and laid his hand on Birbal's shoulder. "Yea! old friend. I have failed--why strain thyself to hide it? Wherefore--God knows! for I have striven." He paused, then went on, "There was a woman at the tank this morning who said that Love was all things. Is it so? Have I not loved enough? Is that the solving of the riddle--is it the Master-Key?"

Birbal's face was a fine study in sarcastic disagreement. "Mayhap, my King! The poets have it so; though in God's truth this wondrous key has unlocked naught for me--save nothingness!"

"A perfect mating," went on the dreamer, absorbed in his own thoughts. "The Twain once more as One, sex and its vain search forgotten. Strange if it should be so! Strange if the finding of Self in the Giving of Self should bring back memory yet forgetfulness of that far beginning when the Ocean of Light everlasting, quiescent, stirred into ripples of Shadow, and the One became Two."

"The Audience waits, sire," said Birbal drily.

Akbar laughed, and went on. Yet he turned to Birbal swiftly half an hour afterward when, in the course of business, words were let fall which brought back the memory of this conversation.

It had been rather a disturbing audience and Akbar, ere he commenced it, had felt wearied beyond his usual measure.

So, as he sate below the throne, the position he invariably occupied as symbolising that he was but the representative of a higher power, he had listened with a certain sense of irritation, while a letter, which Father Ricci, the Jesuit, had left behind him, was read aloud by a slim white-robed man with a marked bend of the head and a kindly, patient face.

It ran as follows:

"To the Most Merciful and Most Illustrious King and Emperor JalÂl-ud-in Mahommed Akbar greeting, from his Father in God and Vicar of Christ, servant of the King of Kings: Whereas for long years past I have to the great injury of the cause of Christ, yet with the most pious hopes of eventual harvest, permitted that good servant of the Lord, priest Rudolfo Acquaviva to reside at the Most-Excellent's court in the hopes that by his godly example and teaching light might come to the eyes, and knowledge to the ears of the Emperor. Yet having, during my recent visit, seen with mine own eyes how small a part the great truths of the Church play in the life of the Most-Excellent, and having in view also the most great favour extended to heretick Protestants----"

Birbal's mime-like face puckered, he bent over the King.

"Said I not the reception of the English merchants would bring about greater zeal for Majesty's conversion?"

But Akbar checked him with a frown; so the long phrases of disappointment, partly pious, partly pique, went on and on. When they closed he turned swiftly to the reader.

"Be thou the arbiter, friend Rudolfo. Dost wish to go? Is Akbar not kind enough?"

PÂdrÉ Rudolfo Acquaviva looked affectionately at the man whom he refused, almost to the point of insubordination, to count accursed.

"The King is not kind enough to himself," he said, his gentle face a benediction, as he noted the strain, the anxiety, which in all moments of rest sate on Akbar's countenance. "Wherefore should not weariness lay down its burden at the gracious command, 'Come unto me and I will give you rest'?"

For a second there was a pause. Then Akbar rose, and squared his broad shoulders. "I could not if I would, friend," he replied proudly. "A King's burden must be carried." So with a loud voice he cried:

"Has any or aught further need of the King's wisdom?"

There was no pause this time.

The MakhdÛm-ul'-mulk, in his robes of chief doctor of the law, stepped forward hastily and began to read.

"Lo! MakhdÛm-sahib," interrupted Akbar lightly vet impatiently, "Majesty hath listened to this before. The petition is dismissed. It hath seemed good to the Crown so to cement union with our RÂjpÛt Allies, the marriage ceremonies are commenced, therefore this demand that the Heir-Apparent shall have his first wife one of his own faith is idle--and ill-timed."

"It hath the signature of fifteen thousand learned Ulemas of IslÂm," continued the MakhdÛm militantly.

"If it had fifty thousand----" interrupted Akbar again; this time sternly.

GhiÂss Beg, the Lord High-Treasurer flung himself, suddenly at the King's feet, and his example was followed by half a dozen of Akbar's most tried and trusted Mohammedan counsellors.

"If the Most-Auspicious will grant us private audience for a space, we will disclose that which may alter Majesty's opinion," said their leader.

Akbar frowned; Birbal and Abulfazl scenting some further conspiracy, stepped forward with instant excuse.

"It is not on the list, sire," said the latter. But the Emperor's sense of Kingship had been aroused, first by his reply to PÂdrÉ Rudolfo, next by the MakhdÛm's militant protest. So with a quaint admixture of pride and humility he set aside the Prime Minister's plea haughtily.

"Justice, Shaikh-jee, is not listed like an auctioneer's tale of goods. Ushers! clear the assemblage! My friends, farewell! I would be alone with these gentlemen for a while."

After the ceremonial salaamings, the rustle and glitter of retreating silks and satins had died away, he faced those few as he stood below the throne.

"Well," he said, "speak."

A little old man, poet as well as prince, prostrated himself, and so began with many flowers of speech, many ambiguities, and many quotations from Hafiz, on the story of Prince SalÎm's sight of Mihr-un-nissa. "Thus O Most Illustrious King, O! Most Indulgent Father, Fate hath intervened and sent Love!" he concluded, adding in pompous monotonous chant the well-known lines:

He whose soul by Love is quickened, never can to death be hurled;
Written is his name immortal in the records of the world.