's eyes. For a long time
she said nothing whatever. Then at last without moving she made reply.

"It's no use, Olga. I can't! I can't! It's not my doing. It's his.
Oh, I think my heart is broken!" Through the anguish of weeping that
followed, Olga clasped her passionately close, frightened, by an
intensity of suffering such as she had never seen before and was
powerless to alleviate.

She slept with Muriel that night, but, waking in the dawning, just
when Muriel had sunk to sleep, she crept out of bed and, with Nick's
ring grasped tightly in her hand, softly stole away.

PART V

CHAPTER XLV

THE VISION

A gorgeous sunset lay in dusky, fading crimson upon the Plains,
trailing to darkness in the east. The day had been hot and cloudless,
but a faint, chill wind had sprung up with the passing of the sun,
and it flitted hither and thither like a wandering spirit over the
darkening earth.

Down in the native quarter a _tom-tom_ throbbed, persistent,
exasperating as the voice of conscience. Somewhere in the distance a
dog barked restlessly, at irregular intervals. And at a point between
_tom-tom_ and dog a couple of parrots screeched vociferously.

Over all, the vast Indian night was rushing down on silent, mysterious
wings. Crimson merged to grey in the telling, and through the falling
dark there shone, detached and wonderful, a single star.

In the little wooden bungalow over against, the water-works a light
had been kindled and gleamed out in a red streak across the Plain.
Other lights were beginning to flicker also from all points of the
compass, save only where a long strip of jungle lay like a blot upon
the face of the earth. But the red light burned the steadiest of them
all.

It came from the shaded lamp of an Englishman, and beneath it with
stubborn, square-jawed determination the Englishman sat at work.

Very steadily his hand moved over the white paper, and the face that
was bent above it never varied--a face that still possessed something
of the freshness of youth though the set of the lips was firm even to
sternness and the line of the chin was hard. He never raised his eyes
as he worked except to refer to the notebook at his elbow. The passage
of time seemed of no moment to him.

Yet at the soft opening of the door, he did look up for an instant, a
gleam of expectancy upon his face that died immediately.

"All right, Sammy, directly," he said, returning without pause to his
work.