“Certain salacious possibilities within its walls still made their insidious appeals to him, and he had not forgotten the ceremonious deference accorded him in the household of the Moghul.
“At the Kutub he had to contrive his own dissipations and excesses.
“There was no need to be clandestine.
“The very frankness of his privileges discouraged his imagination. There was no spice of jeopardy in them; no preludes of intrigue.
“To relieve this surfeit, which is the worst of monotonies, eagerly would the prince have joined the revolting troops, detachments of which he could perceive from the walls of the Kutub hastening along the sun-scorched highway to Delhi.
“But his semi-majesty was cautious.
“It was characteristic of him that his mature reflections should frequently place his impulse under obligations; a condition that had resulted in many a salutary compromise with some proposed moral abandon.
“Should he show the slightest countenance to the native troops in the present emergency, the record of such an attitude would constitute anything but a passport to the continued consideration of the British Government, upon whose sufferance he not only enjoyed his present magnificent residence, but the acknowledgment of his right of succession as well.
“The prince was not yet inclined to believe that the Sepoys could make headway against his detested patrons.
“However, with his mind stimulated by the hazard of the prospect, this picturesque heir-apparent, who had assured himself, since his perusal of the unaccountably delivered missive, that Ram Lal had no intention of making his appearance that day, at least, returned to the apartment where his morning repast awaited him, which he dispatched with the preoccupied impersonality of a savant who consults his timepiece in order to determine the temperature.