"All was over!" thought Imân sadly, as still sitting on the box with Lily-baba, he watched. Surely it had not been his fault. He had done all--only the cheese soufflée had failed, and that happened sometimes even in the house of Lât-Sahibs. Yet it was over.

It was, indeed. Almost including the miraculous car, as deprived of its driver, who was spending part of his tip in the sweet stall, the horse, frightened at the train, reared, bounded forward, and then, finding its progress barred in front by a railing, swerved on its track, and came past the station again, heading for that downward incline with the steep banks falling away on either side.

Elflida grasped the position first, and with a cry of "Lily! Lily!" was at the horse's head as it passed. The possible husband was not far behind--just far enough to make the off rein as convenient to his pursuing feet as the near one, to which she clung, half dragged, helpless, half in wild determination to keep pace with the terrified beast.

"Let go!" he shouted. "He'll get you down, and then--let go, I say!"

She did not answer. In truth, she had no breath for words. And, besides, her mind was not clear enough to grasp his order, though it grasped something else--namely, that relief from her dead weight on one side must bring a swerve to the other. And that must not be till the embankment was passed, or the man holding to the off rein must go under.

"Let go!" he shouted, again and again, as he, in his turn, grasped her purpose; but he might as well have shouted to the dead.

* * * * *

"I believe--I hope--she has fainted," said Alec Alexander, with a catch in his voice not all due to breathlessness, as, the runaway safe held by other captors, he stooped over the girl who lay in the dust, her hands still clenched over a broken rein. Then he lifted her tenderly and carried her back to the station whence the mail train, careless of such trivialities as miraculous cart, had departed.

And if on his way he kissed the closed blue eyes and the blue beads round the childish throat, who shall blame him?

* * * * *