’No, Lady Maulevrier, my mention of this story, with which you are no doubt perfectly familiar, is only a preliminary.  I have come to claim my own, and to appeal to you as a woman of honour to do me justice.  Nay, I will say as a woman of common honesty; since there is no nice point of honour in question, only the plain laws of mine and thine, which I believe are the same among all nations and creeds.  I come to you, Lady Maulevrier, to ask you to restore to me the wealth which your husband stole from my father.’

’You come to my house, to me, an old woman, helpless, defenceless, in the absence of my grandson, the present Earl, to insult me, and insult the dead,’ said Lady Maulevrier, white as statuary marble, and as cold and calm.  ’You come to rake up old lies, and to fling them in the face of a solitary woman, old enough to be your mother.  Do you think that is a noble thing to do?  Even in your barbarous Eastern code of morals and manners is that the act of a gentleman?’

’We are no barbarians in the East, Lady Maulevrier.  I come from the cradle of civilisation, the original fount of learning.  We were scholars and gentleman, priests and soldiers, two thousand years before your British ancestors ran wild in their woods, and sacrificed to their unknown gods or rocky altars reeking with human blood!  I know the errand upon which I have come is not a pleasant one, either for you or for me; but I come to you strong in the right of a son to claim the heritage which was stolen from him by an infamous mother and her more infamous paramour——­’

‘I will not hear another word!’ cried Lady Maulevrier, starting to her feet, livid with passion.  ’Do not dare to pronounce that name in my hearing—­the name of that abominable woman who brought disgrace and dishonour upon my husband and his race.’

‘And who brought your husband the wealth of my murdered father,’ answered the Indian, defiantly.  ’Do not ignore that fact, Lady Maulevrier.  What has become of that fortune—­two hundred thousand pounds in money and jewels.  It was known to have passed into Lord Maulevrier’s possession after my father was put away by his paid instruments.

‘How dare you bring that vile charge against the dead?’

’There are men living in India who know the truth of that charge:  men who were at Bisnagar when my father, sick and heartbroken, was shut up in his deserted harem, hemmed in by spies and traitors, men with murder in their faces.  There are those who know tint he was strangled by one of those wretches, that a grave was dug for him under the marble floor of his zenana, a grave in which his bones were found less than a year ago, in my presence, and fitly entombed at my bidding.  He was said to have disappeared of his own free will—­to have left his palace under cover of night, and sought refuge from possible treachery in another province; but there were those, and not a few, who knew the real history of his disappearance—­who