So he stooped to enforce his command....

She had fainted.

"Help, mother--quick!" he appealed to an elder woman who hovered near
the stall, and responded, instinctively, to the note of command.

As she stooped over the girl he said in low rapid tones: "Listen! It is
an order. Give warm food to her and the child. Take her to the Burra
Sahib's compound. There she will be cared for. I will give word."

He slipped two rupees into her hand, adding: "Two more--when all is done
according to order."

"_Hai! Hai!_ The Sahib is a Son of Princes," murmured the favoured one,
reflecting shrewdly that eight annas would suffice to feed those poor
empty creatures; and gathering up her light burden she bore it away--to
Roy's unfeigned relief.

Would Thea scold him--or uphold him, he wondered,--having committed
himself. The whole thing had been so swift, so unreal, that he seemed
half a world away from the green Residency garden, with its atmosphere
of twentieth-century England, scrupulously, yet unconsciously, preserved
in a setting of sixteenth-century India. And Roy had a strain of both in
his composition.

Across the road Bishun Singh--tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries--was
still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key
announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the
bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a
curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned.
Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had seen that face
before. It was not in India. It was linked with the same sensations, in
a milder form. It would come in a moment....

It came.

Behind the slight, foppish figure, the eye of his mind saw suddenly--not
the sunlight and colour of Jaipur, but a stretch of grey-green sea,
tawny cliffs, and sandy shore ... St Rupert's! Of course, unmistakable:
the sullen mouth, the shifty eyes....

Instantly he went forward and said in English: "I say--excuse me--but is
your name Chandranath?"

The man started and stiffened. "That is no matter to you."

"Perhaps not. Only ... you're very like a boy who was one term at St
Rupert's School with me."

"Well, I _was_ at St Rupert's. A beastly hole----"

He, too, spoke English, and scanned Roy's face with narrowed eyes.
"Sinclair--is it? You tumbled down the cliff on to me--and that Desmond
fellow----?"

"Yes, I did. Lucky for you," Roy answered, stiffening in his turn. But
because of old days