d. Some thick material that had a heavy native
scent about it--such a scent as she remembered vaguely to hang about
Hanani the _ayah_--was thrust over her face and head muffling all
outcry. Muscular arms gripped her with a fierce and ruthless mastery,
and as they lifted and bore her away the nightmare was blotted from her
brain as if it had never been. She sank into oblivion....

CHAPTER IX

THE DESERT OF ASHES

Was it night? Was it morning? She could not tell. She opened her eyes to
a weird and incomprehensible twilight, to the gurgling sound of water,
the booming croak of a frog.

At first she thought that she was dreaming, that presently these vague
impressions would fade from her consciousness, and she would awake to
normal things, to the sunlight beating across the verandah, to the
cheery call of Everard's _saice_ in the compound, and the tramp of
impatient hoofs. And Everard himself would rise up from her side, and
stoop and kiss her before he went.

She began to wait for his kiss, first in genuine expectation, later with
a semi-conscious tricking of the imagination. Never once had he left her
without that kiss.

But she waited in vain, and as she waited the current of her thoughts
grew gradually clearer. She began to remember the happenings of the
night. It dawned upon her slowly and terribly that Everard was dead.

When that memory came to her, her brain seemed to stand still. There
was no passing on from that. Everard had been shot in the jungle--just
as she had always known he would be. He had ridden on in spite of it.
She pictured his grim endurance with shrinking vividness. He had ridden
on to Major Ralston's bungalow and had collapsed there,--collapsed and
died before they could help him. Clearly before her inner vision rose
the scene,--Everard sinking down, broken and inert, all the indomitable
strength of him shattered at last, the steady courage quenched.

Yet what was it he had once said to her? It rushed across her now--words
he had uttered long ago on the night he had taken her to the ruined
temple at Khanmulla. "My love is not the kind that burns and goes out."
She remembered the exact words, the quiver in the voice that had uttered
them. Then, that being so, he was loving her still. Across the
desert--her bitter desert of ashes--the lamp was shining even now. Love
like his was immortal. Love such as that could never die.

That comforted her for a space, but soon the sense of desola