The throng about her had lessened considerably.  Glancing downwards, she discerned at the foot of the steps the old beggar who so persistently haunted the Residency gates, incurring thereby Lady Bassett’s alarmed displeasure.  He was crouching well to one side in the familiar attitude of supplication.  There were dozens like him in Ghawalkhand, but she knew him by the peculiar, gibbering movement of the wiry beard that protruded from his chuddah.  He was repulsive, but in a fashion fascinating.  He made her think of a wizened old monkey who had wandered from his kind.

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.

She never fully remembered afterwards how she came to realise that Nick—­Nick himself—­was there before her in the flesh, fighting like a demon, fighting as she had seen him fight once long ago when every nerve in her body had been strung to agonised repulsion.

She felt no repulsion now—­no shrinking of any sort, only a wild anguish of fear for his sake that drove her like a mad creature down the intervening steps, that sent her flashing between him and his adversary, that inspired her to wrench away the smoking revolver from the murderous hand that gripped it.

She went through those awful moments as a woman possessed, blindly obeying the compelling force, goaded by sheer, primaeval instinct to protect her own.  It was but a conflict of seconds, but while it lasted she was untrammelled by any doubts or hesitations.  She was sublimely sure of herself.  She was superbly unafraid.