He went at last, and she was glad, for a great restlessness possessed her to which it was a relief to give way.  She wandered about the veranda in the dark after his departure, trying to realize fully what had happened.  It had all come upon her so suddenly.  She had been forced to act throughout without a moment’s pause for thought.  Now that it was all over she wanted to collect herself and face the worst.

Her engagement was at an end.  It was mainly that fact that she wished to grasp.  But somehow she found it very difficult.  She had grown into the habit of regarding herself as belonging exclusively and for all time to Montagu Baring.

“He has given me up!  He has given me up!” she whispered to herself, as she paced to and fro along the crazy veranda.  She recalled the look his face had worn, the sternness, the pitilessness of his eyes.  She had always felt at the back of her heart that he had it in him to be hard, merciless.  But she had not really thought that she would ever shrink beneath the weight of his anger.  She had trusted blindly to his love to spare her.  She had imagined herself to be so dear to him that she must be exempt.  Others—­it did not surprise her that others feared him.  But she—­his promised wife—­what could she have to fear?

She paused at the end of the veranda, looking up.  The night was full of stars, and it was very cold.  At the bottom of the compound she heard the water running swiftly.  It did not chuckle any more.  It had become a miniature roar.  It almost seemed to threaten her.

She remembered how she had listened to it in the morning, sitting in the sunshine, dreaming; and her heart suddenly contracted with a pain intolerable.  Those golden dreams were over for ever.  He had given her up.

Again her restlessness urged her.  Cold as it was, she could not bring herself to go indoors.  She descended into the compound, passed swiftly through it, and began to climb the rough ground of the hill that rose behind it above the native village.

The Magician’s bungalow looked very ghostly in the starlight.  Presently she paused, and stood motionless, gazing down at it.  She remembered how, when she and her uncle had first come to it, the native servants had told them of the curse that had been laid upon it; of the evil spirits that had dwelt there; of voices that had cried in the night!  Was it true, she wondered vaguely?  Was it possible for a place to be cursed?

A faint breeze ran down the valley, stirring the trees to a furtive whispering.  Again, subconsciously, she was aware of the cold, and moved to return.  At the same moment there came a sound like the report of a cannon half a mile away, followed by a long roar that was unlike anything she had ever heard—­a sound so appalling, so overwhelming, that for an instant, seized with a nameless terror, she stood as one turned to stone.

And then—­before the impulse of flight to the bungalow had reached her brain—­the whole terrible disaster burst upon her.  Like a monster of destruction, that which had been a gurgling stream rose above its banks in a mighty, brown flood, surged like an inrushing sea over the moonlit compound, and swept down the valley, turning it into a whirling turmoil of water.