After a few commonplace words he took her fan from her hand and whispered to her behind it: 

“There’s a fellow on the veranda waiting to speak to you,” he said.  “Calls himself a friend.”

Her heart leapt at the murmured words.  She glanced hurriedly round.  Everyone in the room was dancing.  She had pleaded fatigue.  She rose quietly and stepped to the window, Toby following.

She stood a moment on the threshold of the night and then passed slowly out.  All about her was dark.

“Go on to the steps!” murmured Toby behind her.  “I shall keep watch.”

She went on with gathering speed.  At the head of the veranda-steps she dimly discerned a figure waiting for her, a figure clothed in some white, muffling garment that seemed to cover the face.  And yet she knew by all her bounding pulses whom she had found.

“Colonel Carlyon!” she said, and on the impulse of the moment she gave him both her hands.

His quiet voice answered her out of the strange folds.  “Come into the garden a moment!” he said.

She went with him unquestioning, with the confidence of a child.  He led her with silent, stealthy tread into the deepest gloom the compound afforded.  Then he stopped and faced her with a question that sent a sudden tumult of doubt racing through her brain.

“Will you take a message to Fort Akbar for me, Averil?” he said.  “A matter of life and death.”

A message!  Averil’s heart stood suddenly-still.  All the evil report that she had heard of this man raised its head like a serpent roused from slumber, a serpent that had hidden in her breast, and a terrible agony of fear took the place of her confidence.

Carlyon waited for her answer without a sign of impatience.  Through her mind, as it were on wheels of fire, Steele’s passionate words were running:  “He lives on treachery.  He would betray any one or all of us to death if it were to the interest of the Empire that we should be sacrificed.”  And again:  “I would sooner tread barefoot on a scorpion than get entangled in Carlyon’s web.”

All this she would once have dismissed as vilest calumny.  But Carlyon’s abandonment of Derrick, and his subsequent explanation thereof, were terribly overwhelming evidence against him.  And now this man, this spy, wanted to use her as an instrument to accomplish some secret end of his.

A matter of life or death, he said.  And for which of these did he purpose to use her efforts?  Averil sickened at the possibilities the question raised in her mind.  And still Carlyon waited for her answer.

“Why do you ask me?” she said at last, in a quivering whisper.  “What is the message you want to send?”

“You delivered a message for me only yesterday without a single question,” he said.

She wrung her hands together in the darkness.  “I know.  I know,” she said; “but then I did not realize.”

“You saved the camp from destruction,” he went on.  “Will you not do the same to-night?”