ther lamp very quickly and put it on the shelf.
Quick! don't stop to fill or to clean it."

Was the pricking, shooting pain the repeated stabbing of the snake's
fangs or was it "pins and needles"? Was this deadly faintness death
indeed, or was it only weakness?

In what seemed but a few more years the man reappeared carrying a
lighted lamp, the which he placed upon a shelf.

"Listen," said Mrs. de Warrenne, "and have no fear, brave Bhil. I have
_caught_ a snake. Get a knife quickly and cut off its head while I
hold it."

The man glancing up, appeared to suppose that his mistress held the
snake on the shelf, hurried away, and rushed back with the cook's big
kitchen-knife gripped dagger-wise in his right hand.

"Do you see the snake?" she managed to whisper. "Under my foot!
Quick! It is moving ... moving ... moving _out_."

With a wild Bhil cry the man flung himself down upon his hereditary
dread foe and slashed with the knife.

Mrs. de Warrenne heard it scratch along the floor, grate on a nail,
and crush through the snake.

"Are!! Dead, Mem-Sahib!! Dead!! See, I have cut off its head! Are!!!!
Wah!! The brave mistress!----"

As she collapsed, Mrs. de Warrenne saw the twitching body of a large
cobra with its head severed close to its neck. Its head had just
protruded from under her foot and she had saved the unborn life for
which she had fought so bravely by just keeping still.... She had won
her brief decoration with the Cross by--keeping still. (Her husband
had won his permanent right to it by extreme activity.) ... Had she
moved she would have been struck instantly, for the reptile was, by
her, uninjured, merely nipped between instep and floor.

Having realized this, Lenore de Warrenne fainted and then passed from
fit to fit, and her child--a boy--was born that night. Hundreds of
times during the next few days the same terrible cry rang from the
sick-room through the hushed bungalow: "It is under my foot! It is
moving ... moving ... moving ... _out!_"

* * * * *

"If I had to make a prophecy concerning this young fella," observed
the broken-hearted Major John Decies, I.M.S., Civil Surgeon of
Bimariabad, as he watched old Nurse Beaton performing the baby's
elaborate ablutions and toilet, "I should say that he will _not_ grow
up fond of snakes--not if there is anything in the 'pre-natal
influence' theory."

PART II.

THE SEARING OF A SOUL.

CHAPTER II.

T