Far in the night, Genevra, sleepless and depressed, stole into the hanging garden.  Her mind was full of the horrid thing that had happened to Hollingsworth Chase.  He had been nothing to her—­he could not have been anything to her had he escaped the guns of the assassins.  And yet her heart was stunned by the stroke that it had sustained.  Wide-eyed and sick, she made her way to the railing, and, clinging to the vines, stared for she knew not how long at the dull red glow on the mountain.  The flames were gone, but the last red tinge of their anger still clung to the spot where the bungalow had stood.  Behind her, there were lights in a dozen rooms of the chateau.  She knew that she was not the only sleepless one.  Others were lying wide awake and tense, but for reasons scarcely akin to hers; they were appalled, not heartsick.

The night was still and ominously dark.  She had never known a night since she came to Japat when the birds and insects were so mute.  A sombre, supernatural calm hung over the island like a pall.  Far off, over the black sea, pulsed the fitful glow of an occasional gleam of lightning, faint with the distance which it traversed.  There was no moon; the stars were gone; the sky was inky and the air somnolent.  The smell of smoke hung about her.  She could not help wondering if his fine, strong body was lying up there, burnt to a crisp.  It was far past midnight; she was alone in the garden.  Sixty feet below her was the ground; above, the black dome of heaven.

She was not to know till long afterward that one of her faithful Thorberg men stood guard in the passage leading up from the garden, armed and willing to die.  One or the other slept in front of her door through all those nights on the island.

Something hot trickled down her cheeks from the wide, pitying eyes that stared so hard.  She was wondering now if he had a mother—­sisters.  How their hearts would be wrenched by this!  A mute prayer that he might have died in the storm of bullets before the fire swept over him struggled against the hope that he might have escaped altogether.  She was thinking of him with pity and horror in her heart, not love.

A question was beginning to form itself vaguely in her troubled mind.  Were all of them to die as Chase had died?

Suddenly there came to her ears the sound of something swishing through the air.  An instant later, a solid object fell almost at her feet.  She started back with a cry of alarm.  A broad shaft of light crossed the garden, thrown by the lamps in the upper hall of the chateau.  Her eyes fell upon a wriggling, snakelike thing that lay in this path of light.