d collapsed there. He was dead in a few
minutes--before anything could be done."

The words pierced through her trance, like a naked sword flashing with
incredible swiftness, cutting asunder every bond, every fibre, that held
her soul confined. She sprang for the open window with a great and
terrible cry.

"Who is dead? Who? Who?"

The red glare of the lamp met her, dazzled her, seemed to enter her
brain and cruelly to burn her; but she did not heed it. She stood with
arms flung wide in frantic supplication.

"Everard!" she cried. "Oh God! My God! Not--Everard!"

Her wild words pierced the night, and all the voices of India seemed to
answer her in a mad discordant jangle of unintelligible sound. An owl
hooted, a jackal yelped, and a chorus of savage, yelling laughter broke
hideously across the clamour, swallowing it as a greater wave swallows a
lesser, overwhelming all that has gone before.

The red glare of the lamp vanished from Stella's brain, leaving an awful
blankness, a sense as of something burnt out, a taste of ashes in the
mouth. But yet the darkness was full of horrors; unseen monsters leaped
past her as in a surging torrent, devils' hands clawed at her, devils'
mouths cried unspeakable things.

She stood as it were on the edge of the vortex, untouched, unafraid,
beyond it all since that awful devouring flame had flared and gone out.
She even wondered if it had killed her, so terribly aloof was she, so
totally distinct from the pandemonium that raged around her. It had the
vividness and the curious lack of all physical feeling of a nightmare.
And yet through all her numbness she knew that she was waiting for
someone--someone who was dead like herself.

She had not seen either Bernard or Tommy in that blinding moment on the
verandah. Doubtless they were fighting in that raging blackness in front
of her. She fancied once that she heard her brother's voice laughing as
she had sometimes heard him laugh on the polo-ground when he had
executed a difficult stroke. Immediately before her, a Titanic struggle
was going on. She could not see it, for the light in the room behind had
been extinguished also, but the dreadful sound of it made her think for
a fleeting second of a great bull-stag being pulled down by a score of
leaping, wide-jawed hounds.

And then very suddenly she herself was caught--caught from behind,
dragged backwards off her feet. She cried out in a wild horror, but in a
second she was silence