All arguments pointed one way. He must have it out with Yasmini in
one battle royal. If she should be willing to surrender, well and good.
He would make her pay for the past, but no doubt there were certain
concessions that he could yield without loss of dignity. If she knew
the secret of the hiding-place of the treasure he would worm it out of her.
There are ways, he reflected, of worming secrets from a woman--ways
and means. If she knew the secret and refused to tell, then he knew
how to provide that she should never tell any one else. If she had told
some one else already,--Samson, for instance, or Jinendra's priest--
then he would see to it that priest or commissioner, as the case might be,
must carry on without the cleverest member of the firm.

But he must hurry. Poison apparently would not work and he did not
dare murder her outright, much as he would have liked to. It was
maddening to think how one not very violent blow with a club or a knife
would put an end to her wilfulness forever, and yet that the risk to
himself in that case would be almost as deadly as the certainty for her.
But accidents might happen. In a land of elephants, tigers, snakes,
wild boars and desperate men there is a wide range for circumstance,
and the sooner the accident the less the risk of interference by some
inquisitive English woman with a ticket-of-admission signed by Samson.

An "accident" in Yasmini's palace, he decided would be nearly as risky
as murder. But he had a country-place fifty miles away in the mountains,
to which she could be forcibly removed, thus throwing inquisitive
Englishwomen off the scent for a while at any rate. That secluded
little hunting box stood by a purple lake that had already drowned its
dozens, not always without setting up suspicion; and between the city
of Sialpore and the "Nesting-place of Seven Swans" lay leagues of wild
road on which anything at all might happen and be afterward explained away.