prang 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