Helen Perowne was brave enough in her way; but the sounds of this struggle, the cries, and their sudden ending, coupled with the threats lately uttered by Murad, made her shudder as she turned, wet with the cold perspiration that gathered upon her face.
What did it mean—that sudden silence? Had they suffocated the poor girl, or had they slain her by some more sudden and deadly stroke?
Helen tried hard to maintain her composure; but her dread increased, and she tottered back to the mats that served her for a couch, to sink down, trembling in every limb.
It was a terrible ordeal, and the more she realised the horrors of her position the more deeply she regretted her conduct to Murad.
For evidently beneath his thin veneer of European manners the Rajah was a remorseless Eastern tyrant, ready to do anything—to sacrifice anything to obtain his wishes.
Unknowingly, or rather carelessly, and with her customary indifference, she had made this man her determined pursuer; and as she thought this, she turned faint, feeling that her position was hopeless in the extreme; and for the moment she felt as if she would go mad.
A violent flood of tears relieved her overburdened brain, and at last she sat up, thinking of her chances of escape, and wondering whether she had let her imagination run riot, and the girl was after all only in a fresh place of confinement.
She decided to take this hopeful view of the case; and feeling better, her eyes lit upon the food that had been brought in, and of which she partook, not so much from choice as from a belief in its being necessary for her strength, which she feared might fail her at any time, perhaps in the direst moment of her need.
Seating herself, then, beside the food, she was trying to eat, when the door was again opened, and one of the women entered quietly, bearing a lighted English lamp.
Helen eagerly questioned her respecting her late companion; but the woman either did not or professed not to understand, merely placing the tall lamp upon a mat on the floor, and hurrying away, seeming as it were to disappear in the gloom on the other side of the lamp, and directly after she heard the door close.