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