"It must have been one of the parrots," he said, "but it sounded remarkably like a woman's voice. It is an unaccountable thing to me how it is that nature should have given the parrot family so remarkable a power of imitating the human voice. Now, as I walked along there I could have been sure that a woman had called to me aloud for help. It sounded very peculiar in this wild jungle, echoing and strange, and it seemed to startle me." There was a regular chorus of whistling and chattering just now, and the chaplain started, for there came directly after a loud whirring of wings; the air seemed full of flashes of green, and blue, and scarlet, and then the stillness was almost painful. "How easily one may be deceived!" he said, quietly. "One notices such things more when one is tired and hungry; and it is very dull work to be alone out here. I wish Bolter could be my companion and--there it was again." The chaplain stopped short and listened, for a wild cry certainly rang out now; and, willing as he was to attribute the strange noise to a bird, it seemed impossible that it could have proceeded from one of them. "If it is a cry," the chaplain said, hastily, "I must be very near to a village, and someone is in trouble." The idea of help being needed roused him so that he hurried on, and kept thrusting back the hanging and running canes which impeded his way, till at the end of a few minutes he came suddenly upon an open space surrounded by trees, with evidently a broad track, leading away towards what, from the difference in the growth of the foliage, must be a stream. Away to the right he could see the gable-end of what was apparently a large palm-thatched house, and over it there was a group of magnificent cocoa-palms, such as at another time would have secured his attention; but now different feelings were awakened, for from out of a low clump of trees he suddenly saw a Malay woman come running, her gay silken sarong and scarf fluttering in the breeze. She saw him evidently, and made signs to him, which, instead of attracting him to her side, made him shrink away. "It is some quarrel among themselves," he muttered, for he recalled the advice he had heard given him as to his behaviour to the people, and the danger of interfering with their home lives. As he thought this, he stopped, and was about to turn away, when a fresh cry smote his ear, and the woman ran a few paces towards him, tottered as she caught her foot in a trailing cane, and fell heavily to the ground. VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN. A DESPERATE ATTEMPT. More long weary days of stifling heat, without a breath of air to relieve the oppression, and more hot suffocating nights, during which, half wild with terror and despair, Helen, like some newly-captured bird, had beaten the bars of her prison in vain.