moon, but without a spark of
life.

When the Rajah saw him, he said, "Oh, pity, pity, that so brave and
handsome a boy should have come dying after this girl! Yet he is but
one of the thousands of thousands who have died thus to no purpose.
Pull up the spears and cast them into the seven ditches, for they
shall remain no longer."

Then he commanded two palanquins to be prepared and men in readiness
to carry them, and said, "Let the girl be married to the young Rajah,
and let both be taken far away into the jungle, that we may never see
them more. Then there will be quiet in the land again."

The Ranee, Panch-Phul Ranee's mother, cried bitterly at this, for she
was very fond of her daughter, and she begged her husband not to send
her away so cruelly--the living with the dead; but the Rajah was
inexorable. "That poor boy died," he said; "let my daughter die, too!
I'll have no more men killed here."

So the two palanquins were prepared. Then he placed his daughter in
the one, and her dead husband in the other, and said to the
palkee-bearers, "Take these palkees and go out into the jungle until
you have reached a place so desolate that not so much as a sparrow is
to be seen, and there leave them both."

And so they did. Deep down in the jungle, where no bright sun could
pierce the darkness, nor human voice be heard, far from any habitation
of man or means of supporting life, on the edge of a dank, stagnant
morass that was shunned by all but noisome reptiles and wandering
beasts of prey, they set them down and left them, the dead husband and
the living wife, alone to meet the horrors of the coming night--alone,
without a chance of rescue.

Panch-Phul Ranee heard the bearers' retreating footsteps, and their
voices getting fainter and fainter in the distance, and felt that she
had nothing to hope for but death.

Night seemed coming on apace, for though the sun had not set, the
jungle was dark so that but little light pierced the gloom; and she
thought she would take a last look at the husband her vow had killed,
and, sitting beside him, wait till starvation should make her as he
was, or some wild animal put a more speedy end to her sufferings.

She left her palkee and went toward his. There he lay with closed eyes
and close-shut lips; black curling hair, which escaped from under his
turban, concealed a ghastly wound on his temple. There was no look of
pain on the face, and the long, sweeping eyelashes gave it such a