Flora Meredith stood in the verandah of her bungalow like one turned to stone. She was horror-stricken, and could not move. At the first alarm her mother, maddened with despair, had rushed out into the compound, and was shot through the heart; and there she lay now, her dead eyes staring blankly up to the red sky.
A man hurriedly crossed the compound. He sprang into the verandah, he stood beside Flora, he passed his arm around her waist. It aroused her to a sense of her awful position. She turned and confronted the intruder. Her eyes fell upon Jewan Bukht.
“You brute!” she cried, “how dare you take such a liberty?”
He laughed, and tightened his hold, as she struggled to free herself.
“I told you we should meet again,” he said, with withering irony. “It is not yet too late; I can yet save you. Say you will marry me.”
By a desperate effort she freed herself from his grasp, and, recoiling away, exclaimed:
“Never! I would rather die a hundred deaths.”
He laughed again—a bitter, cunning laugh—and made a movement as if to seize her.
“Then you shall die,” he exclaimed, unsheathing a long, glittering native dagger.
He was intercepted by a woman—a native. It was Zeemit Mehal.