"They are true."
"They are lies. Now I know why Miss Dimsdale was agitated because of her visit to you. You told her this story also."
"What if I did? The truth----" she flung up a hand as the Colonel took another step forward. "Stand back, I tell you."
"Take your mask off," he insisted, and stretched out his hand.
Diabella swerved to one side and avoided his grasp. Then she dropped into her chair, pressing the arms of the same hard. Immediately from the mummies set round the room came a most unearthly crying, which confounded the Colonel, not expecting such a tumult. The weird room rang with thin wailings and dismal cries. It was evident that some mechanism connected with the chair produced these noises. The place was filled with clever contrivances to intimidate nervous people. But Colonel Towton was not nervous, and after his first startled pause he sprang forward again to seize the seated figure. At all costs he was determined to unmask the sorceress and learn who she was. Then he might hope to find out how she had become possessed of these facts concerning Dimsdale's past life, or whether those same facts were simply lies designed to perplex and mystify.
Diabella never moved as Towton came towards her, and the Colonel soon knew why she was thus certain of her safety. Before he could reach the hither side of the ebony table, rapidly as he moved, he was gripped from behind by two gigantic hands and twisted round sharply to face a tall and burly Hindoo arrayed in a white robe and wearing a white turban. "Let me go, you dog!" muttered Towton in the Tamil dialect, and set his teeth.
Diabella clapped her hands and the two men closed in a fierce struggle. As they swayed round the room the ebony table was upset and the woman cried out a sentence in an unknown language in her metallic voice. The next moment the native unloosened his grip on the Englishman and stepped back.
"Will you go now?" demanded Diabella quietly and addressing Towton.
"No," he cried fiercely. "I want your mask removed."
Whether Diabella gave a sign or not Towton was never able to say, but she must have given a signal, for just as the words left his mouth the native sprang forward with the leap of a tiger and the next moment Towton found a silk handkerchief round his neck. It flashed across him that in this way had Dimsdale been killed, and then, with the tightening of the handkerchief, came almost insensibility, or, rather, a dazed feeling, which bewildered his brain.