She had come to regard him almost in the light of a protege, and, remembering suddenly that he had besought an alms of her in vain some hours before, she turned impulsively to a man she knew who had just come up.
"Colonel Cathcart, will you lend me a rupee?"
He dived in his pocket and brought out a handful of money. She found the coin she wanted, thanked him with a smile, and began to descend the steps.
The old native was not looking at her. Something else seemed to have caught his attention. For the moment he had ceased to cringe and implore.
She heard Sir Reginald's voice above her. He was standing in talk with the Rajah while he waited for his wife.
And then—she was half-way down the steps when it happened—a sudden loud cry rang fiercely up to her, arresting her where she stood—a man's voice inarticulate at first, bursting from mere sound into furious headlong denunciation.
"You infernal hound!" it cried. "You damned assassin!"
At the same instant the old beggar at the foot of the palace steps sprang panther-like from his crouching position to hurl himself bodily at something that skulked in the shadows beyond him.
The marvellous agility of the action, the unerring precision with which he pounced upon his prey, above all, the voice that had yelled in execration, sent such a stab of amazed recognition through Muriel that she stood for a second as one petrified.
But the next instant all her senses were pricked into alertness by a revolver-shot. Another came, and yet another. They were fighting below like tigers—two men in native dress, swaying, straining, struggling, not three yards from where she stood.