The native servants, startled by the pistol-shot, flocked in haste to the veranda. In the lead was Jowar, the Darlings' khitmatgar, whom Nina hated. And he saw her in Andrews's arms.

It was only for an instant, however. The presence of Jowar revived her like a cold shower, and she stood on her own feet with her chin in the air.

"I saw a man running," she explained. "It must have been he that shot through the window. Oh, how frightened I was!"

The khitmatgar inquired as to which way the miscreant had run, and Nina pointed in exactly the opposite direction from that in which she had been facing when she staggered back into young Andrews's embrace.

Jowar set off in pursuit instantly, and the others followed. All, that is, save Nina's ayah, who opportunely produced a bottle of smelling-salts and passed it to the mem-sahib.

Sniffing at it, Mrs. Darling dismissed her.

When Nina and Andrews were back in the drawing-room and again quite alone he saw that she was still trembling. Moreover, in spite of the ruddy glow from the single lamp in the corner, she was as pallid as ashes.

"Dearest," he murmured, hastily encircling her slim waist with a supporting arm, "you are wonderful! Any other woman would be in hysterics."

Very gently she extricated herself from his embrace.

"I haven't lived five years in India for nothing," she said.

"But what was it?" he asked. "Why did you want me to shoot? Why—"

"I fancied that devilish khitmatgar was spying again," she hastened to answer, slipping into a chair. "I saw something move—out there."

"And so you made me shoot at the bronze?"

"It's a very realistic bronze, isn't it?" she asked.

But he didn't answer. "Was it the khitmatgar?" he pressed.

And now she didn't answer.

"The bronze was a present," she went on instead. "Do you mind setting it upright again?"

He did so. "Odd I never saw it before," was his comment. "I thought I'd seen everything in this room. When I was here two days ago it seemed to me that every object spoke of you. I missed nothing. And yet—"

"That came this morning," she told him. "A gift without a card."

Young Andrews frowned.

"It's a horrid thing," he said. "I don't like it."

"It's beautiful!"

"It's ill-omened. I feel it is."

He saw her shiver again, but she tried to smile. Her pallor had grown no less.

"Tell me," he insisted, "was it the khitmatgar, do you think?"

"Who else could it have been? He will tell Jack Darling he saw me in your arms. And then—Hadn't you better be going? Aren't you overdue in Junnar?"

"And leave you? Never!"

"But you must," she said calmly.

"When I go you go with me. Now that I know you love me—"

"I never said I loved you. I don't. I can't. I love but one man. I know it now as never before. For just a moment I thought—" And there she stopped.

"You thought?" he questioned, suddenly agitated.

"I thought I might forget. I thought perhaps you could make me forget. I was, you see, so utterly weary of everything."

"You were right," he cried earnestly. "I can make you forget. I'll give my whole life to it. I'll—"

He bent over her, but she drew away quickly with a gesture of repulsion, which Andrews was quick to note. It cut him cruelly, and he stepped back, pained and crestfallen.

In the instant of silence that ensued he swept her with a devouring gaze from head to foot. Was he to lose her again—now, when for a second time he had been so sure?

One dainty, white-shod foot was stretched out from beneath her skirt, and as his eyes reached it a dark, smearlike stain across the toe arrested his attention and awoke a question. Impulsively he dropped to one knee and swept a finger across it.

"Nina!" he cried, springing up again, a note of alarm in his voice. "Look! There is blood on your slipper. It couldn't have been the khitmatgar. The bullet ricochetted and wounded some one. Who was it?"

She leaned forward, her heart pounding with sudden horror, and saw it for herself.

"But how—" she queried, her breath short and quick.

"From the shrubbery at the side of the veranda. Your foot must have touched the leaves. If it had been the khitmatgar who was bleeding like that he couldn't have hidden it."

She was up in an instant, crying: "What have I done? Oh, what have I done?"

"Between us," said Andrews, "we've managed to wing some prowling beggar of a native, I fancy. That's all." He said it in an effort to pacify her, but he knew in his heart that it was no native.

He had known from the first that Nina's scream, emotion, and pallor were results of the unexpected. Now he was more certain than ever that he was right.

For quite a minute she paced the floor, wringing her hands. Then there was a rap on the glass of the long window, and the tall, dusky, white-clad Jowar stepped into the room. His expression was unusually grave.

"The mem-sahib is mistaken," he said. "The fleeing sahib goes the other way. He is wounded. We follow the sahib until we see him enter the compound of the hotel. All the way the sahib leave trail of blood behind."

Nina had halted, her hand clutching a curtain as if to stay herself. At the words of the khitmatgar she swayed, and but for Andrews would have fallen, for the curtain stuff broke from its rings under her weight.

It was her companion who signed to Jowar that he might go. Then he supported her to a settee and eased her down upon it.

The cantonment at Umballa, which is four miles from the native town, boasts several hotels.

In a large upper room in one of these, not far from the bungalow of the Darlings, a burly, bearded gentleman—who had registered a few hours before as Henry Scripps, of Bombay—was at that moment impatiently and in no little pain awaiting the appearance of the English surgeon who lived nearest.

Around Mr. Scripps's left wrist was an improvised tourniquet, and the water which filled the basin on the wash-stand was claret-colored.

Mr. Scripps had just succeeded in filling a brier pipe with his right hand unaided, and was in the act of striking a match when his room door was swung hurriedly ajar to admit Mayhan, of the Buff Hussars, with his kit of surgical instruments.

"You've taken the devil's own time it appears to me," growled Mr. Scripps. "Now you're here, for God's sake, make haste!"

The greeting took the young surgeon somewhat aback.

"Sorry you think so," he returned, leisurely opening his bag and pretending that the catch had caught by way of retaliation. "As a matter of fact, I came on the instant."

Scripps rumbled under his breath and emitted a volume of gray smoke.

"Shot in the hand, I understand," Mayhan went on, wrenching the bag open at length with considerable fuss and feather.

Scripps grunted an affirmative.

"How did it happen?" the surgeon inquired, taking out a probe.

But the wounded man didn't answer. He dropped into a chair under the light and said: "Come now, make haste."

Mayhan emptied the blood-stained water from the basin, poured some fresh, and mixed an antiseptic in solution. Then he began cleaning the wound.

"Rather nasty, that," he commented. "The bullet has dug in here between the two outer metacarpal bones, and I'm not sure it hasn't shattered the trapezium."

"Get it out," cried Scripps impatiently, "and talk about it afterward. I'll grant you know the anatomy of the hand and the name of every bone in it. That's about the first thing you're taught."

Mayhan gritted his teeth. The man was certainly a boor. Still there was perhaps provocation in the pain he was suffering. Nevertheless, the surgeon rather enjoyed the probing. He knew how he was hurting, yet his victim wouldn't give him the satisfaction of wincing.

He drew it out at last and held it up to the light.

"I know that," he said, inspecting it. "A forty-five of the sort they use in those new American automatics. Has yours the new safety device?"

Scripps's teeth let go his lip long enough to growl: "No! That was the devil of it!"

As the young surgeon proceeded with his work of cleansing he continued to chatter:

"I was hoping it had. I wanted to see it. Colonel Darling was speaking of it last night at the club. There's a friend of his here—a young fellow named Andrews, from over on the Bombay side—who has one. He's promised Darling to show it him."

Scripps was pale from pain, but his grit was indomitable. He choked back a groan and said:

"Darling? Colonel Darling? I think I know him."

"I dare say."

Scripps relapsed into silence again. The wound still hurt abominably.

"Darling distinguished himself at Spion Kop, you know," Mayhan gave tribute as he unwound some iodoform gauze. "Fine chap, the colonel."

But his patient only grunted.

"Same man you know?" the other pressed.

Scripps nodded.

"I'll mention you're here."

There was no reply.

"Know him well?" inquired the surgeon guardedly.

Scripps had his lip in his teeth again, and it was bleeding; but he let it go.

"Better than he knows me, apparently," he said with a grim smile.

"He'll remember your name, I suppose?"

"I'm sure he won't. He won't know who Scripps is from Adam."

Mayhan, mollified now in a measure by the man's fortitude, used the cocain that he had denied him at first and proceeded with the dressing.

"If you're so keen on telling the colonel, just say you've seen Nibbetts," the brusk one suggested.

"Nibbetts?"

"Yes. He'll know then."

"I'll remember. I'll probably see him to-night at the club. He may look you up at once, if you don't mind. Fine fellow, the colonel."

The relief from the cocain was instantaneous, but Scripps's manner showed no change.

"That's twice you said that," he rumbled. "There are some that don't agree with you."

"I know," returned Mayhan. "Some never agree with any one. That's where the word disagreeable comes from."

Scripps made no retort, and the dressing continued in silence. When it was finished and Mayhan was repacking his kit, he ventured: "Nibbetts, you said, didn't you?"

The merest movement of the tawny, leonine head gave assent.

"I'll tell him." And then the surgeon took a closer look. Scripps's bearded chin was on his breast. His face, in spite of its tan, was deathly white. "By the way," he added, "you'd better have a brandy peg. You've lost some blood, you know, and—"

"That's my business," the other interrupted roughly. "You're a sawbones, not a medical man. And a sawbones sans merci, at that. Otherwise you'd have begun with the cocain, instead of ending with it."

Mayhan turned away without another word and made a wry face behind the savage's back. Two minutes later he was down the stairs and in the hotel porch, where he was confronted by young Andrews.

"I saw you go in," lied the latter nervously. "And I've been waiting for you. What happened? I've a reason for asking."

The young surgeon, whose faculty for putting two and two together was as acute as the next man's, sensed the reason at once.

"He won't die," he answered—"if that's what you want to know."

"Who won't die?" Andrews came back evasively. He had volunteered to get what information he could for Mrs. Darling, and he was distinctly uncomfortable under the attitude taken by this man whom he had started to question.

"The boor upstairs who got in the way of someone's forty-five-caliber automatic. It wasn't by any chance yours, I suppose?"

The blood rushed to Andrews's face, but in the dim light of the porch it is probable that Mayhan failed to observe it.

"I don't indulge in indiscriminate pistol practice," he defended weakly. "I heard a man had been wounded and came in here, and I strolled over to inquire out of idle curiosity."

"He won't die," said Mayhan again, and prepared to move away.

"But who is he?" asked Andrews, following a step.

"The most insufferable beast I've met in years—name of Scripps."

"Army man?"

"No; civilian. Or uncivilian, rather."

"Badly hurt?"

"Hand torn up a bit. Anything else you'd like to know?"

Andrews hesitated. Then: "Say how it happened?"

Mayhan grinned toward the shadows.

"Oh, yes," he answered wickedly, "of course! Naturally, I asked him."

"Well—"

"You are curious, Andrews, aren't you?"

"Oh, if there's any secret about it—why, I—"

Mayhan laughed irritatingly; so irritatingly that his questioner was tempted to silence him with his fist.

"No secret at all," the surgeon said, starting off. "It happened—purely by accident."

Then young Andrews, nettled and thoroughly uncomfortable, hastened back to Nina with his scant news. The name "Scripps" meant nothing to her.

But Mayhan, meanwhile, dropping into the club, exploded a bombshell. He found Colonel Darling alone and brooding in his chosen corner, a tall glass of Scotch and soda at his right hand.

"I say, colonel," he blurted, "just came from a chap who says he knows you—or did. Name of Nibbetts."

Darling started so violently that his arm struck the table, jarred it, and sent over the whisky glass, splashing.

For a moment his face flamed and the veins in his neck swelled to the danger point. He gripped the chair-arms, and his throat emitted an inarticulate gurgle.

The next minute he relaxed suddenly, pale as paper.