Two days later, Moti and Sunni heard the English bugles half a mile away.  They were playing ‘Weel may the keel row!’ the regimental march-past, as Colonel Starr’s Midlanders did the last half mile to their camping-ground.  The boys were in the courtyard among the horses, and Sunni dropped the new silver bit he was looking at, held up his head, and listened.  He was the same yellow-haired, blue-eyed Sunni, considerably tanned by the fierce winds of Rajputana; but there came a brightness over his face as he listened, that had not been there since he was a very little boy.

‘How beautiful the music is!’ said he to Moti.

Moti put his fingers in his ears.

‘It is horrible,’ he cried.  ’It screams and it rushes.  How can they be able to make it?  I shall tell my father to have it stopped.’

Presently the bugles stopped of themselves, and Moti forgot about them, but the brightness did not go out of Sunni’s face, and all day long he went about humming the air of ‘Weel may the keel row,’ with such variations as might be expected.  He grew very thoughtful toward evening, but his eyes shone brighter than any sapphires in the Maharajah’s iron boxes.  As to an old Mahomedan woman from Rubbulgurh, who cooked her chupatties alone and somewhat despised, she heard the march-past too, and was troubled all day long with the foolish idea that the captain-sahib would presently come in to tea, and would ask her, Tooni, where the memsahib was.

CHAPTER IX

Sunni had his own room in the palace, a little square place with a high white wall and a table and chair in it, which Dr. Roberts had given him.  The table held his books, his pen and ink and paper.  There was a charpoy in one corner, and under the charpoy a locked box.  There were no windows, and the narrow door opened into a passage that ran abruptly into a wall, a few feet farther on.  So nobody saw Sunni when he carried his chirag, his little chimneyless, smoking tin lamp, into his room, and set it in a niche on the wall, took off his shoes, and threw himself down on his charpoy at eleven o’clock that night.  For a long time he had been listening to the bul-buls, the nightingales, in the garden, and thinking of this moment.  Now it had come, and Sunni quivered and throbbed all over with excitement.  He lay very still, though, on the watch for footsteps, whispers, breathings in the passage.  Four years in the palace had taught Sunni what these things meant.  He lay still for more than two hours.

At last, very quietly, Sunni lifted himself up by his elbows, put first one leg, and then the other, out of the charpoy, and got up.  More quietly still he drew the locked box from under the bed, took a key from his pocket, and opened it.  The key squeaked in the wood, and Sunni paused again for a long time, listening.  Then in the smoky, uncertain light of the chirag flaring in the niche, he took