'She doth not belong to me,' shrilled Miss Leezie. 'She comes from the city. I am not responsible. I will prove her thief.' 'It is a lie! I am no thief,' gasped Sobrai, shrinking still farther from the policeman, who stepped up on to the plinth, while the red-coat, held by the other two, struggled madly. 'Oh! dash it all,' muttered the officer to himself, 'this can't be allowed. Sergeant, send your prisoner to the quarter-guard under escort, and see that every one returns to barracks at once. Constable, arrest both women.' Miss Leezie fell on her knees and shrieked. '_Huzoor!_ I can prove her thief. She hath pearls like the Lady-_sahib's_ pearls. She offered them to me as a bribe to take her into my house this very day, and I, dissembling, said I would see, and kept the pearls to show the police. I have them. She is thief for sure!' 'Touch me not! I am no thief; they are mine!' panted Sobrai as the policeman dragged her forward. Then, as the sense of indignity came to her, she fought desperately. 'I am no thief--I am no common woman. Touch me not, I am Sobrai of the Nawâb's house! The pearls are his. I am princess, I say? Will none help me? Oh! Lateef, Lateef! say it is true!' She had broken from her captor with sudden irresistible passion, and thrown herself at the feet of some one who had newly pushed his way into the crowd; so, her hands clasping a pair of thin legs, she looked in frantic appeal to the thin face of the kite-maker. But Lateefa knew his part of hanger-on to nobility better than to admit anything derogatory to its honour. He essayed to pass on with his quaint cry-- 'Use eyes and choose, Use and choose.' It was, perhaps, an unfortunately well-known one; and many of those present, seeing the girl's brocades and remembering her gestures, hesitated; while one said-- 'He is Lateefa of Jehân's house for sure. She hath his name pat. Mayhap she says truth!' The sergeant of police pulled out another pair of handcuffs with evident joy. 'There is room for both in the lock-up,' he said cheerfully. Lateefa gave a jerk to the string he held, which sent the single kite, which he always reserved as his trade-mark, skimming downwards in the gloom, to rise again higher than ever. 'Mayhap! I am Lateef, for sure, as God made me. And she is what the devil made her--a woman!' There was something of Lateefa's philosophy in the police-officer's words when, an hour or two later, he called round at Government House to say that four pearls, apparently belonging to Lady Arbuthnot's string, had been found in the Lal bazaar in a dancing-girl's house. 'The house where I saw that girl as I passed?' asked Grace quickly. She felt, somehow, that it must be so; that there was a fate in it.