d, and at the same time I understood the reason of that sudden
look of alarm in her face, the murmuring sounds she had uttered, and the
downward startled glance. Her fears had been solely for my safety, and
she had warned me! Too late! too late! In moving I had trodden on or
touched the serpent with my foot, and it had bitten me just above the
ankle. In a few moments I began to realize the horror of my position.
"Must I die! must I die! Oh, my God, is there nothing that can save me?"
I cried in my heart.

She was still standing motionless in the same place: her eyes wandered
back from me to the snake; gradually its swaying head was lowered again,
and the coil unwound from her ankle; then it began to move away, slowly
at first, and with the head a little raised, then faster, and in the end
it glided out of sight. Gone!--but it had left its venom in my blood--O
cursed reptile!

Back from watching its retreat, my eyes returned to her face, now
strangely clouded with trouble; her eyes dropped before mine, while the
palms of her hands were pressed together, and the fingers clasped and
unclasped alternately. How different she seemed now; the brilliant face
grown so pallid and vague-looking! But not only because this tragic end
to our meeting had pierced her with pain: that cloud in the west had
grown up and now covered half the sky with vast lurid masses of vapour,
blotting out the sun, and a great gloom had fallen on the earth.

That sudden twilight and a long roll of approaching thunder,
reverberating from the hills, increased my anguish and desperation.
Death at that moment looked unutterably terrible. The remembrance of all
that made life dear pierced me to the core--all that nature was to me,
all the pleasures of sense and intellect, the hopes I had cherished--all
was revealed to me as by a flash of lightning. Bitterest of all was the
thought that I must now bid everlasting farewell to this beautiful being
I had found in the solitude this lustrous daughter of the Didi--just
when I had won her from her shyness--that I must go away into the cursed
blackness of death and never know the mystery of her life! It was
that which utterly unnerved me, and made my legs tremble under me, and
brought great drops of sweat to my forehead, until I thought that the
venom was already doing its swift, fatal work in my veins.

With uncertain steps I moved to a stone a yard or two away and sat down
upon it. As I did so the hope came to me