The girl drew back, pale as death and unable to cry out.  He glanced around.  The tall, red-leaved bushes hid them; there was no one or nothing within sight, except the elephant shifting restlessly.

“Answer me!” he said almost menacingly.

She was silent.  He sprang forward and seized her roughly.

“Speak!  You must answer,” he said.

The girl shrank at his touch and struggled in vain in his powerful grasp.

Then suddenly she cried out: 

“Badshah!”

The Chinaman thrust his face, inflamed with passion and desire, close to hers.

“You must, you shall, come to me—­by force, if not willingly,” he growled.  “By all the gods or devils——.”

But at that instant he was plucked from her by a resistless force and hurled violently to the ground.  Dazed and half-stunned he looked up and saw the elephant standing over him with one colossal foot poised over his prostrate body, ready to crush him to pulp.  Brave as the Chinaman was he trembled with terror at the imminent, awful death.

But a quiet voice sounded clear through the garden.

“Jane do! (Let him go!)”

The elephant brought the threatening foot to the ground but stood, with curled trunk and ears cocked forward, ready to annihilate him if the invisible speaker gave the word.  The girl shrank against the great animal, clinging to it and looking with horror at the prostrate man.  The Amban slowly dragged his bruised body from the ground and staggered shaken and dizzy out of the garden.

Muriel kissed the soft trunk and laid her cheek against it, and it curved to touch her hair with a gentle caress.  Then she fled into the bungalow to find Colonel Dermot on the verandah grimly watching the Chinaman stumbling blindly up the steep road.  His wife beside him opened her arms to the shaken girl.

“He shall pay for that some day, Muriel,” said the Political Officer sternly.  “But not yet.”

An hour later the two women watched the snaking line crawl up the steep face of the mountains, and through field-glasses they could distinguish Badshah with his master on his neck, the Deb Zimpun and his followers and the tall form of the Chinaman, until all vanished from sight in the trees clothing the upper hills.

Benson and Carter left that afternoon, Muriel remaining to spend a longer time with her friend and, as she told Wargrave, to try and regain the affections of the children which he had stolen from her.

Frank was thinking of her next day as he was standing on the Mess verandah after tea, cleaning his fowling-piece, when on a wooded spur running down from the mountains and sheltering the little station on the west he heard a jungle-cock crowing in the undergrowth not four hundred yards away.  Seizing a handful of cartridges he loaded his gun and, running down the steps and across the garden, plunged into the jungle.  He walked