grinning fiends, and clasping his left arm, which was
now free, round Edith, and pressing her tightly to him, carried on a
desperate struggle with his sword.

For Mrs. Baird and her children he could do nothing further. Now that
he had seen his faithful Morar Gopal fall under the blows of some
Mohammedans he felt that they were irretrievably lost. He had seen how
the Colonel's wife had had her clothes torn in shreds from her body; he
heard the heartrending cry of anguish with which, under the blows and
thrusts of her inhuman torturers, she called for her children. But at
all events he was spared the agony of seeing with his own eyes the end
of the innocent little girls. They disappeared from his view in the
terrible confusion, and as they were besides already half dead from
terror, Providence would, at all events, have the pity not to let
them feel the tortures of the death which their unfeeling butchers had
prepared for them.

And what of Edith?

She was not in a faint. In her features one could read nothing of the
anguish of horror that overcomes even the bravest in the face of death.
One might imagine that all that was going on around her had lost its
terrors since Heideck's arm held her fast.

But the moment was not favourable for allowing Heideck to feel the
pleasurable bliss of her love. His strength was at an end and, although
with the exception of a slight injury on the shoulder he was unwounded,
he yet felt it intolerably hard to wield the sword whose heavy blows had
hitherto kept their assailants (with the exception of some adventuresome
spirits, who had paid dearly for their impudence) at a respectful
distance. At the very moment that fatigue compelled him to drop his
weapon, Edith and he would be given over helpless to the devilish
cruelty of this horde of human beasts. That he knew full well, and,
therefore, although before his eyes there floated, as it were, a
blood-red mist, he collected the last remnant of his strength to
postpone this terrible moment yet for a little--All of a sudden
something unexpected, something wonderful, happened--something that in
his present condition he could not understand at all; innumerable cries
of terror and alarm mingled with the frenzied, triumphant howlings of
the rage-intoxicated Indians. With the irresistible force of a wave the
whole thickly packed swarm of human beings surged forwards and against
the houses on both sides of the street. The trotting of horses, lo