Excerpt from At the Court of the Maharaja: A Story of Adventure Kate pouted her ripe lips in slight annoyance. From the shelter of her silken canopy she detected a smile on the face of the spiced personage who passed. Of course he understood now that she was not in society. Were he an acquaintance, a paying guest in her mother's Bays water boarding-house, there would be no need for pre tense. But Kate knew that she impressed strangers. Then why destroy a pleasant fiction? And what did Marion mean by the birdless grove? The passer-by really smiled at hearing the sporting phrase. Kate, whose musings were always introspective, would not have believed his solemn oath to that effect. The policeman, chewing his chin-strap, with thumbs stuck in his trousers pockets and solemn strut of the force, was still in full view, but now she cared not how the sunshine tilted; it was too bad of Marion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.