From every side was this wail echoed:  “Fly, People of the Black Kendah, for the gods are dead!”

They turned; they sped away like shadows, carrying their wounded with them, nor did any attempt to stay them.  Thirty minutes later, save for some desperately hurt or dying men, not one of them was left in the temple or the pass beyond.  They had all gone, leaving none but the dead behind them.

The fight was finished!  The fight that had seemed lost was won!

I dragged myself from the ground.  As I gained my tottering feet, for now that all was over I felt as if I were made of running water, I saw the men who held Ragnall loose their grip of him.  He sprang to where his wife was and stood before her as though confused, much as Jana had stood, Jana against whose head he rested, his left hand holding to the brute’s gigantic tusk, for I think that he also was weak with toil, terror, loss of blood and emotion.

“Luna,” he gasped, “Luna!”

Leaning on the shoulder of a Kendah man, I drew nearer to see what passed between them, for my curiosity overcame my faintness.  For quite a long while she stared at him, till suddenly her eyes began to change.  It was as though a soul were arising in their emptiness as the moon arises in the quiet evening sky, giving them light and life.  At length she spoke in a slow, hesitating voice, the tones of which I remembered well enough, saying: 

“Oh!  George, that dreadful brute,” and she pointed to the dead elephant, “has killed our baby.  Look at it!  Look at it!  We must be everything to each other now, dear, as we were before it came—­unless God sends us another.”

Then she burst into a flood of weeping and fell into his arms, after which I turned away.  So, to their honour be it said, did the Kendah, leaving the pair alone behind the bulk of dead Jana.

Here I may state two things:  first, that Lady Ragnall, whose bodily health had remained perfect throughout, entirely recovered her reason from that moment.  It was as though on the shattering of the Ivory Child some spell had been lifted off her.  What this spell may have been I am quite unable to explain, but I presume that in a dim and unknown way she connected this effigy with her own lost infant and that while she held and tended it her intellect remained in abeyance.  If so, she must also have connected its destruction with the death of her own child which, strangely enough, it will be remembered, was likewise killed by an elephant.  The first death that occurred in her presence took away her reason, the second seeming death, which also occurred in her presence, brought it back again!

Secondly, from the moment of the destruction of her boy in the streets of the English country town to that of the shattering of the Ivory Child in Central Africa her memory was an utter blank, with one exception.  This exception was a dream which a few days later she narrated to Ragnall in my presence.  That dream was that she had seen him and Savage sleeping together in a native house one night.  In view of a certain incident recorded in this history I leave the reader to draw his own conclusions as to this curious incident.  I have none to offer, or if I have I prefer to keep them to myself.