around me, as we hurried down passage after passage and
opened door after door in the search for those two whom I had come to
save. Finally the eunuch stopped at a certain door at the very end of
the darkest passage we had yet traversed. It was opened, and I looked
in.

I could not at first believe that what I beheld was a human being.
Stretched out on the damp soil of the den lay a miserable, shrunken
object, a thing like a skeleton wrapped in parchment, with the faint
outlines of a man. On our entrance it moved and just raised its head.

"What do you want?" it asked in Indostanee. And then in English it
breathed, "Is this the end?"

It was the voice of my cousin Rupert!

With a cry, I was on my knees by his side, lifting his woeful head in
my arms.

"Rupert! Look! It is your cousin Athelstane!"

He moved slowly and sat up. Then a shudder went through his attenuated
frame.

"Don't you see what they have done to me?" he groaned. "The devils
have put out my eyes!"

And the devils had. Rupert Gurney, the bold, handsome, careless,
wicked, swaggering Rupert, whom I had loved and feared and hated all
my life, would never be bold nor handsome nor swaggering any more, and
I should never need to fear or hate him again. His wickedness had been
rewarded; his crimes had met a heavier retribution than any I had ever
thought to inflict. He had fallen into the hands of one compared to
whom he had been but a beginner in iniquity; one fit of Surajah
Dowlah's cruel frenzy had struck upon him, and had left him branded
for life.

Of Marian's fate he knew nothing. As soon as I had given directions to
have him carried up out of the dungeon I renewed my search for her
with a heart ready to burst at the thought of what I might find.

When we did find her I was almost relieved. After the frightful
apprehensions I had entertained, it seemed to be good fortune that
she should be merely wasted away, without any outward disfigurement of
that face that had been my beacon in dreams and raptures for those
vain years. In my own arms I bore her out of that doleful place and up
into the open air, through the palace now swarming with the stir and
bustle of the newly arrived Nabob's Court, into the garden where the
day was breaking and the birds were beginning to sing, and laid her
down, at her own desire, on a bed in that very summer-house where I
had tried--ah, why had I failed?--to rescue her on the night that
seemed so long ago.

There