d organization of his own, began to use the secret system of which he
by right formed an integral part and to set wheels working within the
wheels which in course of time should spew him up on the ledge which his
brother now occupied. Long before the rebellion was ready he had all
his preparations made and waited only for the general conflagration to
strike for his own hand. And was so certain of success that he dared
make plans as well for Rosemary McClean's fate.

There is a blindness, too, quite unexplainable that comes over whole
nations sometimes. It is almost like a plague in its mysterious arrival
and departure. As before the French Revolution there were almost none of
the ruling classes who could read the writing on the wall, so it was in
India in the spring of '57. Men saw the signs and could not read their
meaning. As in France, so in India, there were a few who understood, but
they were scoffed at; the rest--the vast majority who held the reins of
power--were blind.

Rosemary McClean discovered that her pony had gone lame, and was angry
with the groom. The groom ran away, and she put that down to native
senselessness. Duncan McClean sent one after another of the little
native children to find him a man who would take a letter to Mount Abu.
The children went and did not come back again, and he put that down to
the devil, who would seem to have reclaimed them.

Both of them saw the watchers, posted at every vantage-point, insolently
wakeful; both of them knew that Jaimihr had placed them there. But
neither of them looked one inch deeper than the surface, nor supposed
that their presence betokened anything but the prince's unreachable
ambition. Neither of them thought for an instant that the day could
possibly have come when Britain would be unable to protect a woman of
its own race, or when a native--however powerful--would dare to do more
than threaten.

Joanna disappeared, and that led to a chain of thought which was not
creditable to any one concerned. They reasoned this way: Rosemary had
seen Mahommed Gunga hold out a handful of gold coins for the old
woman's eyes to glitter at, therefore it was fair to presume that he
had promised her a reward for bringing word to the man whom, it was
now known, he had left behind. She had brought word to him and had
disappeared. What more obvious than to reason that the man had gladly
paid her, and had just as gladly ridden off, rejoicing at the thought
that he could