t interrupt, and Shere Ali
spoke again, with a smile slowly creeping over his face.

"I will not go alone to Mecca. I will follow the example of Sirdar Khan."

The saying was still a riddle to Ahmed Ismail.

"Sirdar Khan, your Highness?" he said. "I do not know him."

Shere Ali turned his eyes again upon the flame of the lamp, and the smile
broadened upon his face, a thing not pleasant to see. He wetted his lips
with the tip of his tongue and told his story.

"Sirdar Khan is dead long since," he said, "but he was one of the five
men of the bodyguard of Nana, who went into the Bibigarh at Cawnpore on
July 12 of the year 1857. Have you heard of that year, Ahmed Ismail, and
of the month and of the day? Do you know what was done that day in the
Bibigarh at Cawnpore?"

Ahmed Ismail watched the light grow in Shere Ali's eyes, and a smile
crept into his face, too.

"Huzoor, Huzoor," he said, in a whisper of delight. He knew very well
what had happened in Cawnpore, though he knew nothing of the month or the
day, and cared little in what year it had happened.

"There were 206 women and children, English women, English children,
shut up in the Bibigarh. At five o'clock--and it is well to remember the
hour, Ahmed Ismail--at five o'clock in the evening the five men of the
Nana's bodyguard went into the Bibigarh and the doors were closed upon
them. It was dark when they came out again and shut the doors behind
them, saying that all were dead. But it was not true. There was an
Englishwoman alive in the Bibigarh, and Sirdar Khan came back in the
night and took her away."

"And she is in Mecca now?" cried Ahmed Ismail.

"Yes. An old, old woman," said Shere Ali, dwelling upon the words with a
quiet, cruel pleasure. He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw
it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily--an old,
wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary,
so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so
coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had
once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed
she was of his race. He set another picture side by side with that--the
picture of Violet Oliver as she turned to him on the steps and said,
"This is really good-bye." And in his imagination, he saw the one picture
merge and coarsen into the other, the dainty trappings of lace and
ribbons change to a shapeless cloak,