“No, no, Doctor,” she cried; “don’t leave me, pray!”
“What? The deuce!” exclaimed the little man, starting. “How the dickens did you know I was a doctor? I say; I know your voice; who—”
“Don’t you know me again, Doctor?” she cried, passionately, and cutting short his speech.
“Know you? What—why?—It is? No. Yes: Helen Perowne!”
The poor girl burst into a frantic hysterical fit of crying.
“Why, my poor darling! my dear child! my poor little woman!” cried the doctor, raising her head to his breast, and holding her there, kissing her again and again as the tears ran down his ruddy face. “My poor little bairnie! This is dreadful! There, there, there, my dear, you are quite safe now,” he continued, patting her and caressing her as a father would a favourite child. “But there; what a milksop I am; crying like a great girl, I declare, when I ought to shout hooray! to think I have found you safe, if not quite sound. Why, my dear child, Perowne will hug me for this. Poor old boy, he has been half frantic.”
“But, Doctor,” she sobbed, “they will catch me again, and drag me back to that dreadful place. Look here,” she cried, with a mingling of pitiful appeal and angry indignation, and she held out her scratched and torn brown hands, and then turned her face and showed her teeth to him. “I have been cruelly used. They made me look like one of his wretched wives, so that I should not be known.”
“But who—who did all this?”
“Murad, and I have been kept a prisoner here at a dreadful place, deep in the jungle, where I saw no one but his wretched creatures. Oh, Doctor, Doctor, kill me, or I shall go mad!”
“Kill you? of course I won’t, my dear. The dog! the scoundrel! the smooth-faced hypocrite! I’ll blow his brains out! I’ll skin him and make a specimen of him to take him back to England and exhibit him as a demon. Hang him! I don’t know what I won’t do!” cried the doctor, stamping with passion. “Here, you two,” he cried, “don’t stand staring like that, but bring the young lady some coffee.”