He put his arm round her.  “My dear, what do you think a tatterdemalion gipsy is going to do to me?  He may be a snake-charmer, and if so the sooner he is got rid of the better.  There!  What did I tell you?  He is coming out of his corner.  Now, don’t be frightened!  It doesn’t do to show funk to these people.”

He held her closely to him and waited.  Beside the flowering azalea something was undoubtedly moving, and as they stood and watched, a strange figure slowly detached itself from the shadows and crept towards them.  It was clad in native garments and shuffled along in a bent attitude as if deformed.  Stella stiffened as she stood.  There was something unspeakably repellent to her in its toadlike advance.

“Make one of the men send him away!” she whispered urgently.  “Please do!  It may be a snake-charmer as you say.  He moves like a reptile himself.  And I—­abhor snakes.”

But Dacre stood his ground.  He felt none of her shrinking horror of the bowed, misshapen creature approaching them.  In fact he was only curious to see how far a Kashmiri beggar’s audacity would carry him.

Within half a dozen paces of them, in the full moonlight, the shambling figure halted and salaamed with clawlike hands extended.  His deformity bent him almost double, but he was so muffled in rags that it was difficult to discern any tangible human shape at all.  A tangled black beard hung wisplike from the dirty chuddah that draped his head, and above it two eyes, fevered and furtive, peered strangely forth.

The salaam completed, the intruder straightened himself as far as his infirmity would permit, and in a moment spoke in the weak accents of an old, old man.  “Will his most gracious excellency be pleased to permit one who is as the dust beneath his feet to speak in his presence words which only he may hear?”

It was the whine of the Hindu beggar, halting, supplicatory, almost revoltingly servile.  Stella shuddered with disgust.  The whole episode was so utterly out of place in that moonlit paradise.  But Dacre’s curiosity was evidently aroused.  To her urgent whisper to send the man away he paid no heed.  Some spirit of perversity—­or was it the hand of Fate upon him?—­made him bestow his supercilious attention upon the cringing visitor.

“Speak away, you son of a centipede!” he made kindly rejoinder.  “I am all ears—­the mem-sahib also.”

The man waved a skinny, protesting arm.  “Only his most gracious excellency!” he insisted, seeming to utter the words through parched lips.  “Will not his excellency deign to give his unworthy servant one precious moment that he may speak in the august one’s ear alone?”

“This is highly mysterious,” commented Dacre.  “I think I shall have to find out what he wants, eh, Stella?  His information may be valuable.”

“Oh, do send him away!” Stella entreated.  “I am not used to these natives.  They frighten me.”