'Dead,' she echoed. 'Bah! thou liest! He is not dead. There is no water, and there is no death----'
She broke off suddenly, silenced by his look as he stood with one hand raised as if listening. In the breathless air a strange whispering reached her ear, and like an arrow from a bow, she flew to the gap in the palisade, whence she could see the dip between the ruins and the canal bank, and beyond that silver streak again to the bungalow dotted down upon the level plain.
'Dohai! Dohai!'
The Great Cry--the blind human cry of her race for justice burst from her instinctively. The next moment found her bare-faced in the open on her way to prove if the old man spoke truth in death also.
'Azîzan! go not! Leave not the House of Safety! It is the Flood of the Most High! Go not, oh! go not!'
His unavailing plea came back to him unanswered from the night which had fallen suddenly, as the dust from below sprang electrically up to meet the dust above and hide everything from sight. But through the thick veil that rush of water rose louder and louder as the girl sped on her way. It was true what the old man had said, and she had seen it. There was a river by the old palace. Was the other thing true also? Was the sahib dead? Had they killed him? The darkness lightened a little as she ran over the bridge so that she could see a great swirl of yellow water shooting past the piers not three inches below the keystone of the arch. Lower down it had found the open sluice-gates, hurled them from their foundations and carried them with it as it burst through the embankment weakened by the new-made cuttings of the villagers, and had raced in a mad river to fling itself against the mound of Hodinuggur, tearing down yard after yard of crumbling sand as it turned abruptly from the collision, to try conclusions by a flank movement. Azîzan saw none of this; nothing but the dim white arches where she had waited once before.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
No answer, and in her eagerness she crouched down at the closed door, tapping softly.
'Sahib! Sahib!'
There was only a quarter-inch planking between them, that was all, for they had left him as he fell till some other white-face should come to accept the responsibility of interference. Yet it did the work as effectually as all the barriers of custom and culture which had divided them in life.