It would be hard to say when first the rumour spread that the Rajah of little Mindapore was making a hoard. None knew how it began or where. Perhaps from merchants of whom he had bought. It began long before the days of the safe. It was said that rubies had been bought and hidden away; and then not only rubies, but ornaments of gold, and then pearls, and diamonds from Golconda, and all manner of precious stones. Even the Deputy-Commissioner at Allapore heard of it. At last the story re-entered the palace at Mindapore itself, and Azim Khan, who was the Rajah’s cousin and his heir, and nominally his commander-in-chief, and Golam Shah, the chief minister, talked it over one with another in a tentative way. “He has something new,” said Golam Shah, querulously; “he has something new, and he is keeping it from me.” Azira Khan watched him cunningly. “I have told you what I have heard,” he said. “For my own part I know nothing.” “He goes to and fro musing and humming to himself,” said Golam, meditatively, “as one who thinks of a pleasure.” “More rubies, they are saying,” said Azim, dreamily, and repeated, as if for his own pleasure, “Rubies.” For Azim was the heir. “Especially is it since that Englishman came,” said Golam, “three months ago. A big old man, not wrinkled as an old man should be, but red, and with red hair streaking his grey, and with a tight skin and a big body sticking out before. So. An elephant of a man, a great quivering mud-bank of a man, who laughed mightily, so that the people stopped and listened in the street. He came, he laughed, and as he went away we heard them laugh together—” “Well?” said Azim. “He was a diamond merchant, perhaps—or a dealer in rubies. Do Englishmen deal in such things?” “Would I had seen him!” said Azim. “He took gold away,” said Golam. Both were silent for a space, and the purring noise of the wheel of the upper well, and the chatter of voices about it rising and falling, made a pleasant sound in the air. “Since the Englishman went,” said Golam, “he has been different. He hides something from me—something in his robe. Rubies! What else can it be?” “He has not buried it?” said Azim. “He will. Then he will want to dig it up again and look at it,” said Golam, for he was a man of experience. “I go softly. Sometimes almost I come upon him. Then he starts—” “He grows old and nervous,” said Azim, and there was a pause. “Before the English came,” said Golam, looking at the rings upon his fingers, as he recurred to his constant preoccupation; “there were no Rajahs nervous and old.”