With Selim in the lead, the little procession moved swiftly but cautiously through the black jungle, bent on reaching the gate if possible before the night lifted.  Chase and Bobby Browne brought up the rear with the two reserve carriers in hand.  Browne, weak and suffering from torture and exposure, struggled bravely along, determined not to retard their progress by a single movement of indecision.  He had talked volubly for the first few minutes after their rescue, but now was silent and intent upon thoughts of his own.  His head and face were bruised and cut; his body was stiff and sore from the effects of his valiant battle in the cavern and the subsequent hardships of the march.

In his heart Bobby Browne was now raging against the fate that had placed him in this humiliating, almost contemptible position.  He, and he alone, was responsible for the sufferings that Lady Agnes had endured:  it was as gall and wormwood to him that other men had been ordained to save her from the misery that he had created.  He could almost have welcomed death for himself and her rather than to have been saved by George Deppingham.  As he staggered along, propelled by the resistless force which he knew to be a desire to live in spite of it all, he was wondering how he could ever hold up his head again in the presence of those who damned him, even as they had prayed for him.

His wife!  He could never be the same to her.  He had forfeited the trust and confidence of the one loyal believer among them all....  And now, Lady Deppingham loathed him because his weakness had been greater than hers!

When he would have slain the four helpless islanders with his own hands, Hollingsworth Chase had stayed his rage with the single, caustic adjuration: 

“Keep out of this, Browne!  You’ve been enough of a damned bounder without trying that sort of thing.”

Tears were in Bobby Browne’s eyes as, mile after mile, he blundered along at the side of his fellow-countryman, his heart bleeding itself dry through the wound those words had made.

It was still pitch dark when they came to the ridge above the park.  Through the trees the lights in the chateau could be seen.  Lady Agnes opened her eyes and cried out in tremulous joy.  A great wave of exaltation swept over Hollingsworth Chase. She was watching and waiting there with the others!

“Dame Fortune is good to us,” he said, quite irrelevantly.  Selim muttered the sacred word “Allah.”  Chase’s trend of thought, whatever it may have been, was ruthlessly checked.  “That reminds me,” he said briskly, “we can’t waste Allah’s time in dawdling here.  Luck has been with us—­and Allah, too—­great is Allah!  But we’ll have to do some skilful sneaking on our own hook, just the same.  If the upper gate is being watched—­and I doubt it very much—­we’ll have a hard time getting inside the walls, signal or no signal.  The first thing for us to do is to make everything