“Oh no, I’m all right now. I should like to get it over, Dick.”
“Well, you certainly seem to have picked up wonderfully. I suppose there’s no doubt of your knowing them again?”
Mabel shuddered. “How could I help recognising them? The red light, and those awful faces—it seems as if the whole thing was photographed on my mind. I should know them anywhere.”
“Oh, all right. It would be far worse, you know, to try to identify them and fail than to let the thing go altogether.”
“You needn’t be afraid. Only I should be glad not to have to look forward to it much longer.”
“Very well. No doubt it’s better to do it before the impression has a chance of fading from your mind. It’s a bother about the Commissioner, though. He insists on being present, and Georgie and Tighe say he mustn’t on any account be allowed to move until they have wired his knee. We shall have to carry his bed out on the verandah, I suppose. Just like him to think the show can’t go on without him. Of course he’s afraid we shall contrive to bring his precious protégé in guilty in some underhand way.”
Mabel smiled as Dick went down the steps, for she knew better. Mr Burgrave’s anxiety was not so much for Bahram Khan personally as for his own schemes, and not so much for them as for the continuance of his friendship with the North family. This knowledge, and the pleasing conviction that she alone possessed it, sustained her when she was summoned in the afternoon to identify her three surviving assailants.
“Come along,” said Dick, entering the drawing-room; “they’re all here, and Tighe has superintended the removal of the distinguished patient. They’re in the verandah outside his room. Don’t be frightened, Mab. Georgia shall come too, and support you.”
In spite of her resolution, Mabel trembled a little as she entered the improvised police-court, realising once more what issues hung upon her words. Fitz was there, and a Hindu clerk, and the Commissioner, propped up in bed. Before them stood a dozen natives with turbans and clothes of various degrees of picturesque dirt and raggedness, guarded by as many dismounted troopers armed to the teeth.
“Now, Mab, pick ’em out,” murmured Dick, from behind his sister.