"Strike!" she cried, "murderer and villain as you are, strike! and end the wretched life of the poor slave; you have already wounded me, and another blow will free me from my misery; I thought I could have died then, but death will not come to me. Will you not kill me?"--and she spat on him. "This is not to be borne; fool that I was to take so much trouble to preserve a worthless life," cried the Khan, sheathing his sword; "thou shalt die, and that quickly." He threw his roomal about her neck, and she writhed in her death agonies under his fatal grasp. "There!" cried he, quitting his hold, "I would it had been otherwise; but it was her fate, and I have accomplished it!" and he left the body and strode on in moody silence. Some of the Lughaees coming up, the body was hastily interred among the bushes which skirted the road, and nothing now preventing us, we pursued our journey with all the speed we could. Thankful was I that I had sent on Azima in her cart; she was far beyond the scene of violence which had happened, and of which she must have guessed the cause had she been within hearing; but the driver of her cart had hurried on, and we had travelled some coss ere we overtook her. Strange, Sahib, that after that day Surfuraz Khan was no longer the light-hearted, merry being he had used to be. He was no novice at his work; hundreds of human beings, both male and female, had died under his hand; but from the hour he killed the slave he was an altered being: he used to sit in silent, moody abstraction, his eyes gazing on vacancy, and when we rallied him upon it, his only reply was a melancholy smile, as he shook his head, and declared that his spirit was gone: his eyes too would on these occasions sometimes fill with tears, and sighs enough to break his heart would escape from him. He accompanied us to our home, got his share of the booty, which he immediately distributed among the poorer members of the band, and after bidding us a melancholy farewell, stripped himself of all his clothes, covered his body with ashes, and went forth into the rude world, to bear its buffets and scorn, in the guise of a Fakeer. I heard, years afterwards, that he returned to the spot where he had killed the girl, constructed a hut by the road-side, and ministered to the wants of travellers in that wild region, where his only companions must have been the bear, the tiger, and the wolf. I never saw him again after he parted from us, and many among us regretted his absence, and his daring skill and bravery, in the expeditions in which we afterwards engaged: his place was never filled among us.