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o that by imitating his tactics I was able to leap through immediately after him. I stumbled in alighting, picked myself up, and glanced round, to perceive the man I had been pursuing standing over against me with a pistol in his hand. The next moment I had recognised the room, and there was Marian standing up with a distressed face, one hand on her bosom and the other stretched out between us. "Stand back!" shouted the spy to her in English, in a voice that I could have recognised anywhere in the world. "This is a damned Indian spy, whom I will kill as soon as I have questioned him." "You lie, Rupert Gurney," says I, quite calm and cold, as I drew out my own pistols and stood facing him. "'Tis you are the spy, in the service of a vile, treacherous, Moorish tyrant, to whom you would betray your countrymen." I do not think I have ever seen a man so overwhelmed as was Rupert by those words, though the surprise of this encounter must in reality have been less to him than it was to me, since Marian had of course told him of my being in Calcutta. His jaw dropped, and he ceased to present his pistol at me, no doubt being well aware that I would not take him at a disadvantage. "Yes," I continued, "not satisfied with your piracies and murders, for which you are justly afraid to show your face in any English community, you are now become a traitor and a public enemy. You have hired yourself out to that bad man, Surajah Dowlah, and go about to deliver your fellow Christians into the hands of Mussalmans and heathen." "Not so fast, young man," says Rupert, resuming his natural insolence. "Your reproaches are unfair in one particular at least. I am no longer a Christian, having exchanged that religion for the more convenient and profitable one of the Alcoran." He added a coarse jest which I am ashamed to write down, and which a year or two before I believe he would have been ashamed to utter. I have heard that residence in the East Indies has this effect upon some men, to change their characters to evil, so that when they return to Europe they are no longer fit for the decent society of their own country. And though my cousin Gurney was an unscrupulous and daring young man before ever he left Norfolk, yet I believe he was altered for the worse after his visiting those parts. Marian, standing terrified between us, now interfered to say-- "Be silent, Rupert, if you please. And you, Athelstane, since you perceive you
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