As for Maraj, it was obvious now how he had escaped capture and punishment for all those horrible murders. Anybody could understand it now, since the Brahmins had told the truth about it. The Ranee had been protecting him all along. Her offer of a heavy reward for his capture had been nothing but a blind to deceive people. She had been making use of Maraj to get rid of her enemies. True, many of the people murdered by Maraj had seemed unimportant and not dangerous. It was equally true that some of them had been notorious enemies of the Brahmins. But there were plain answers to both those questions. In the first place, tyrants grow afraid of shadows, and kill imagined enemies without rhyme or reason, that being one of the aspects of tyranny. In the second place, people who oppose themselves to religious authority must not blame the authorities if the gods take steps to destroy such opposition. Nobody should blame the Brahmins for the gods' annoyance. One did not have to like the Brahmins personally, or even collectively, nor need one approve of all their arrogance, in order to see the unfairness of blaming them for what the gods might do. One did not have to hate the Ranee or to call her beauty ugliness and her generosity meanness, in order to see what a fool she had made of herself, and what a wicked woman she had been to employ and subsidize Maraj. * * * * * Besides, the Ranee had discarded _purdah_ and neglected many of the ancient customs. She had repeatedly defied the Brahmins who are, after all, the fountain-head of wisdom. She had opened hospitals, where people died at the hands of heretical doctors in spite of all the genuine remedies that were smuggled to their bedside. She had opened a school for women, where women were actually taught, in so many words, that they had rights as well as obligations. She had closed the brothels, which, as everybody knew, were a social safety-valve. And she was proposing to marry a man of her own choosing. The gods don't tolerate such infidelity for long; when they are weary of it, they act suddenly and swiftly. So the city was in an expectant, ugly mood, and there were ugly rumors, borne on the wings of nobody knew what. Everybody knew that something terrible was going to happen. Those who owned property were afraid, and those who owned none, or owed money, were belligerently watchful. The only thing that prevented rioting from breaking out in a sort of spontaneous combustion was the gleam on the bayonets of the Ranee's infantry and the beautifully polished brass of their machine gun, strategically stationed where they could do the greatest amount of damage in the shortest possible time. The sun beat down on all that mixed emotion like a million discordant cymbals of yellow brass, heat and noise being only different vibrations of the self-same violence.