"It's merely a question of nerves, old boy. You would have been picturing the details over and over again when the beggars were not talking about 'em, whereas I was able to put them out of my mind. Well, we got to Agpur at last, and once in the palace, Sher Singh set to work to try kindness. He let me take up my quarters--watched day and night, of course--in your old Residency, which looks a good deal the worse for wear since you left it. The servants you left in charge seem to have taken first choice when they heard you were hardly likely to come back, and then the palace servants and the guards had their turn. Your books were all torn to pieces--they must have thought you had gold-leaf hidden between the pages--and scattered all about the place. I camped in the ruins, and Sher Singh came to see me twice. He talked to me like a man and a brother, pointed out how important it was for him to find the treasure, what a guarantee of peace it would be, and how he was obviously the rightful owner now that his father and brother were dead. I agreed with him in everything, but declined respectfully to say whether I knew where it was or not. When he proceeded to threats, I told him that he must think me as big a fool as I was beginning to consider him. I was not going to tell him whether I knew the secret, because if I did know it, he would at once begin to make things very unpleasant for me, and if I didn't, he might kill me as useless. On the other hand, he could not proceed to extremities while he was still uncertain, because if I knew the hiding-place, he would have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, and if I didn't, he would have thrown away uselessly his one chance of placating Antony. That was just when Nisbet was beginning to thunder at the gates of Agpur--or rather, a good way off them--so it appealed to him. Of course the flaw in the argument was that if he knew his business, his torturer might contrive to extract the answer to the question, and the secret, without killing me, but I had to treat that possibility as absolutely non-existent. Still, he found out the secret at last." "Bob!" cried Gerrard anxiously.