Hanani paused dramatically.
"Go on!" gasped Stella almost inarticulately.
Hanani took up her tale again in a mysterious whisper that crept in eerie echoes about the ruined place in which they sat. "Mem-sahib, Hafiz said that there was doubtless a reason for which he feigned death. He said that Dacre sahib was a bad man, and my lord the captain sahib knew it. Wherefore he followed him to the mountains and commanded him to be gone, and thus—he went."
"But who—told—Hafiz?" questioned Stella, still struggling against unbelief.
"How should Hanani know?" murmured the ayah deprecatingly "Hafiz lives in the bazaar. He hears many things—some true—some false. But that Dacre sahib returned last night and that he now is dead is true, mem-sahib. And that my lord the captain sahib lives is also true. Hanani swears it by her grey hairs."
"Then where—where is the captain sahib?" whispered Stella.
The ayah shook her head. "It is not given to Hanani to know all things," she protested. "But—she can find out. Does the mem-sahib desire her to find out?"
"Yes," Stella breathed.
The fantastic tale was running like a mad tarantella through her brain. Her thoughts were in a whirl. But she clung to the thought of Everard as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a rock. He yet lived; he had not passed out of her reach. It might be he was even then at Khanmulla a few short miles away. All her doubt of him, all evil suspicions, vanished in a great and overwhelming longing for his presence. It suddenly came to her that she had wronged him, and before that unquestionable conviction the story of Ralph Dacre's return was dwarfed to utter insignificance. What was Ralph Dacre to her? She had travelled far—oh, very far—through the desert since the days of that strange dream in the Himalayas. Living or dead, surely he had no claim upon her now!
Impulsively she stooped towards Hanani. "Take me to him!" she said. "Take me to him! I am sure you know where he is."