The morning sun was rising in a glory of crimson splendour when the mutineers, stained with blood and dust and grimed with powder, swarmed over the Jumna and clattered into Delhi. Under the windows of the palace they surged, and called for the king--that white-haired, treacherous old villain, who believed that his hour of triumph had struck, and that the house of Moghul would be restored to its ancient splendour. The rebels were admitted by the Mohammedan guard, and then they almost shook the wall with a thunderous shout of ‘Glory to the Padishah and death to the Feringhees!’ Swelled now by their comrades of the palace they swarmed into the town, cutting down every European they met, and a detachment rushed for the house held by Shelton and his sweetheart and his two other companions. The lower doors and windows had been barricaded; and from the upper windows a well-delivered fire checked for a moment the onrush of the mutineers. But it was only for a moment. Some of their number had gone down into the dust, but that only served to still further madden the survivors, who stormed the house, to be beaten back, however, once more by the defenders’ fire. Recovering themselves, they fired a volley at the windows, and one of the bullets struck the corporal dead. Shelton saw now that it would be impossible to hold the place for many minutes, and he turned with anxious gaze to the beloved woman at his side. Her face was pale as death, but she was calm, and in her hand she still grasped the smoking revolver. Every barrel was empty, and she had sent at least four of the rabble to their account. ‘My beloved,’ he exclaimed in a tone of despair, ‘I fear that hope of saving you has passed.’ ‘Yes, darling,’ she said, quietly. ‘Hope for us in this world has gone; but we shall be united in the next. Load the revolver again.’ He quickly thrust a cartridge into each barrel, and returned it to her, and at the same moment he saw his brave and only remaining soldier companion go down, shot through the head. Then he kicked in the head of a barrel of powder he had taken the precaution to have brought up, and passing his arm round Blanche’s waist he was about to fire his revolver into the powder, when he suddenly changed his mind, and said hurriedly: ‘Darling, I believe we can escape and find safety in the fort.’ ‘Where you go, I will go,’ she answered.