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"Ah-h-h!" was her greeting the unbidden, irrepressible, astonished gasp of mixed emotion of a crowd that sees more wonder than it bargained for. The twelve princesses took their place beside her on the dais, six on either side. Immediately behind her Tess and Hasamurti stood. Yasmini's other maids arranged themselves with their backs to the gilded door.
Then she recalled Yasmini's warning that Tom Tripe had no brains and must be told what to do. Her own wits began to work desperately. "I'm the lady doctor, Tom. That is my written order from the burra sahib." Tom scratched his head and swore in a low voice fervently.
Sialpore, across the river, was a dinning riot of excitement flags, triumphal arches, gala clothes and laughter everywhere. Dick Blaine, driving Tess toward Yasmini's palace in the very early dawn, had to drive slowly to avoid accident, for the streets were already crowded.
Dick little suspected, as he drove the dog-cart across the bridge toward the club, chuckling over the quick success of Yasmini's ruse, that he himself had set the stage for tragedy. So stay awake, my sportsman bold, And peel your anxious eye, There's more than tigers, so I'm told, To test your cunning by! "Me for the princess!"
He looked up to see Yasmini's face framed in the opening, and he thought there was more devilment expressed in it, for all her loveliness, than in her voice that never quite lost its hint of laughter. He did not answer, and the trap-door closed again.
Three days and nights of circus life, as Tess described it afterward to Dick. Yasmini and Tess rode part of the way on an elephant, lying full-length in the hooded howdah with a view of all the country-side, starting before dawn and resting through the long heat of the day. But monotony formed no part of Yasmini's scheme of life, and daring was the very breath she breathed.
As he set the second lamp down he became aware of a subtle interesting smell, and memory took back at once to Yasmini's room in the Chandni Chowk in Delhi where he had smelled it first. It was the peculiar scent he had been told was Yasmini's own a blend of scents, like a chord of music, in which musk did not predominate.
On the night of Yasmini's escape Samson sat sweating in his private room, with moths of a hundred species irritating him by noisy self- immolation against the oil lamp-whose smoke made matters worse by being sucked up at odd moments by the punkah, pulled jerkily by a new man.
His eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle of the crystal, no longer feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute he could not have withdrawn them had be tried. The crystal clouded over. Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a little hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else the whole world, seemed to sway in time to it.
Guard him until I call for him! Keep him exercised!" was the three-fold order that sang through the trooper's head and overcame astonishment in the hurry to obey. Now it was the German's turn to be astonished. Ranjoor Singh strode in, dressed as a Sikh farmer, and frowned down Yasmini's instant desire to poke fun at him.
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