would drop his monocle and look up with a sharp, challenging stare of his ironic gray eyes, as if expecting you to contradict him.
It was not that the presence of a raja, or any other East Indian potentate or near-potentate was an unusual occurrence in London. Rajas are more common there than Nevada plutocrats at a Florida resort, or black-cocks on a Yorkshire moor. London is the capital of a motley and picturesque empire, and pink turbans soften the foggy, sulfurous drab of Fleet Street; lavender turbans bob up and down the human eddy of the Burlington Arcade; green and red and white turbans blotch the sober, workaday atmosphere of East Croydon and Pimlico.
Nor was it anything in Martab Singh's appearance or reputation. For, as to the first, he was good-looking in rather a heavy, simple, bovine fashion, with two hundred pounds of flesh and brawn carried by his six foot two of height, his great, staring, thick-fringed, opaque eyes, his melancholy smile, and his magnificent beard, dyed red with henna, which was split from the chin down the center and then curled up on either side of his face so that the points, which
