He and Beatrice Cary were linked together either in good-natured chaff or malicious earnest, and curiosity, thanks to the dullness of the season, strained itself in expectation. Thus, beyond the marble gates the world laughed, and inside Life and Death had faced each other and for a moment hung in the balance. It was toward the cool of the evening. Behar Asor and the prince paced slowly backward and forward in the chief entrance hall of the palace, plunged in a conversation which was to mark a final stage in their relationship toward each other. Both knew it, and on both faces was written the same determination--a determination curiously tempered and moulded by the character of the man himself. On Behar Asor's furrowed, withered face it was resolve, armed with treachery and all the hundred and one weapons of oriental cunning. Nehal Singh's head was lifted in calm, unshakable confidence. He had no need of weapons. He had seen his destiny, and the obstacle which would be thrown in his path would, with equal certainty, be thrown out of it. He felt himself extraordinarily strong. His very surroundings seemed to fortify him with their splendor. Other parts of the palace bore the grievous traces of a past devastating race-hatred; crumbling pillars, images whose jeweled eyes had been made dark and lifeless by robber hands; broken pavements, defaced carvings--all these pointed to a period in human life which was gone for ever, a period of mad fanaticism and passionate clinging to the Old in defiance of the New. Here the New was triumphant. Hands still living had raised the mighty golden dome; the fountain whose waters bubbled up from the Sacred Tank within the temple was his own creation. The whole place became a sort of outward and visible sign of the New Life, New Era, which was opening out before him, and the old man at his side was nothing more than a relic, a piece of clinging wreckage. Yesterday he had been a wise man whose judgment and guidance was a thing to be considered. But between Yesterday and Today there is occasionally a long night in which much may happen. A life may go out, a life may come in; a devil may become a saint, or a saint a devil; a man may swing from one pole of opinion to another, and this last is perhaps the easiest of all. For it does not require much to change a man's standpoint. A very little thing will make him turn on his heel and look at a piece of the landscape which he has hitherto chosen to ignore or despise, and probably acknowledge that it is finer than his hitherto obstinately retained outlook. A very little thing--like Columbus' egg--if one only knew just what it was! The little thing in Nehal Singh's life had been a woman's face. It shone between him and his old gods; it smiled at him from amidst the shadows of his imagination, beckoning him unceasingly to follow. And he was following--with the reckless speed of a man who had been kept inactive too long at the starting point of life.