There was a terror-stricken hush.  Frank looked across in horror.  The lamplight barely showed in the shadow under the chair a deadly hill-viper writhing its way out within a few inches of the small foot firmly planted in its dainty, high-heeled shoe.  He looked at the motionless girl.  Less pale than the men about her she sat quietly, smiling faintly and apparently not frightened by the Death almost touching her.  One pink hand lay without a tremor in her lap, but the other rested on the arm of her chair and the knuckles showed white as the fingers gripped the bamboo tightly.  She did not even glance down.  But the men, frozen with dread, watched the shadowy writhing line passing her foot slowly, all too slowly, until it had wriggled out into the centre of the circle of motionless beings.  Then Colonel Dermot sprang up.  Seizing his light bamboo chair in his powerful grip he whirled it aloft and brought it crashing down on the viper, shattering the chair but smashing the reptile’s spine in half a dozen places.

The other men had risen from their seats; but the girl remained seated and said quietly: 

“Thank you very much, Colonel, for warning me.  I might easily have moved my foot and trodden on the snake.  I’ve seen so many of the horrid things in camp lately.  Now, Captain Burke, I’m sorry that the interruption spoiled your story.  Please go on with it.”

Her coolness silenced the men, who were breaking into exclamations of relief and congratulation.  Even her father sat down again calmly.

But Burke’s enthusiastic admiration of her courage found an outlet at Mess that night when he recounted the adventure to Major Hunt and appealed to Wargrave for confirmation of the story of her plucky behaviour.  Later in his room as he was going to bed Frank smiled at the recollection of the Irishman’s exuberant expressions; but he confessed to himself that the girl’s calm courage was worthy of every praise.

“She is certainly brave,” he thought.  “I’m not surprised at old Burke’s infatuation.  She is decidedly pretty.  What lovely eyes she’s got—­and what a provokingly attractive little nose!  Well, the doctor’s a lucky man if she marries him.  She seems awfully nice.  Violet will certainly have two very charming women friends in the station if she hits it off with them.”

But as his eyes rested on her pictured face his heart misgave him; for he remembered that she had little liking for her own sex.  And then, he told himself, these two would probably refuse to know a woman who had run away from her husband to another man.  When he had turned out the light and jumped into bed he lay awake a long time puzzling over the tangle into which the threads of her life and his seemed to have got.  Time alone could unravel it.