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"He must die he must die!" exclaimed several voices, and Dermot found himself once more hurried close up to the gallows. The brutal fellow who had been selected to act as herald, provoked by the reception he had met with, undertook to act as executioner. Dermot's arms were bound tightly behind him, and he was again placed on the pony from which he had dismounted.

The sepoy, a smart young Punjabi Mussulman, clad in the white undress of the Indian Army, saluted and strode off up the hill to the pretty mess-bungalow of the British officers of the detachment. In it the subaltern occupied one room. When he received Dermot's message, this officer, a tall, good-looking man of about twenty-eight years of age, accompanied the orderly to his senior's quarters.

A girl with eyes half-defiant, half-coquettish, lips demure and smiling, hair tied loosely in a knot at the back of her proudly-set head, was leaning against the white-washed wall of a thatched cabin ah! it was Dermot's own! Eily noted the geraniums in the little blue box that he had tended himself.

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot!" was whistled out of the wood; and the whistle Viola knew quite well enough to disarm me when I came to the argument what was to become of her if she let such things be done with her; and she had quite enough of Dermot's composition in her to delight in a "little bit of naughtiness that wasn't too bad," and when once she had resigned herself into the hands of her captor she enjoyed it, and twittered like a little bird; and I believe Harold really did it, just as he would have caught a rare bird or wild fawn, to please me.

The soothing silence of the woodland was broken only by the crowing of a jungle cock. The thick, leafy screen overhead excluded the glare of the tropic sunlight; and the heat was tempered to a welcome coolness by the dense shade. But, despite the soporific motion of his huge charger, Dermot's vigilant eye searched the apparently lifeless jungle as he was borne along.

That his uncle Shane was devoted to her, and that the kind Miss O'Reilly had promised always to watch over her. Many wild thoughts and schemes passed frequently through Dermot's mind. He dared not at first give utterance to them, not even to himself, and he would have found it impossible to mention them to any human being.

Much as she saw of other men now many of them attractive and some of whom she frankly liked none had effaced Dermot's image or displaced him from the shrine that she had built for him in her inmost heart. Mingled with her love was hero-worship. She dared not hope that he could ever be interested in or care for any one as shallow-minded as she.

The catastrophe at the fair had gained him two friends, entirely unlike one another Dermot, who thenceforward viewed him with unvarying hero-worship, and accepted Eustace as his appendage; and George Yolland, the very reverse of all Dermot's high-bred form of Irishism, and careless, easy self-indulgence.

Before Wargrave lost consciousness he marvelled at Dermot's uncanny power over the huge beasts around them a power that could make these shy mammoths thus subservient to his purposes. He began to understand why his companion was regarded as a demigod by the wild jungle-folk and hill-dwellers.

As the first approached it lifted its trunk, and to Dermot's astonishment gently touched him on the leg with it. Then it passed on and the next animal took its place and in its turn touched the man. The succeeding ones did the same; and thus all the elephants defiled by their domesticated companion and touched or smelt Dermot as they went by.