Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/141

 and lacking in refinement! This is a princess from the North traveling in state with her own people—a pukka princess—and not a sniveling, unimportant Maharanee from the South. Away!”

“It is against regulation seventeen, paragraph eight!” cried a Babu railway clerk, brown faced, agate eyed, very fat and oily, and clad in white gauze which, considering his fantastic bodily contours, gave him a grotesque and not at all decent appearance. “Regulation says that …”

And he was promptly and vituperatively told what to do with the regulation, with the book which included it, the saheb who had written it; and when, in a magnificent flight of Bengali imagination, the Babu swore by Shiva and Vishnu and Brahm that the Viceroy himself insisted on this particular rule in regard to baggage being carried cut to the letter, the keeper of the princess' jewels told him, in a stage whisper, that, the very next time she came to Calcutta, she would call on the Viceroy and make him eat stick!

Hector, meanwhile, had been talking to Aziza Nurmahal who, in answer to his question, replied that Al Nakia was a Tartar word, the aboriginal language of Tamerlanistan, and that it meant “The Expected.”

“Expected—by whom?” puzzled Hector.

“But surely thou knowest—why—” She seemed a little surprised. “Expected—according to the ancient prophecy! Expected—to seal the wooing of swords!”

“More mystifying, unintelligible wooing of swords stuff!” thought Hector, while the princess complicated matters yet more by saying:

“These servants can be trusted. They were my