"That--" said Hanani, and paused as if considering how best to present the information,--"that was another _sahib_." "Another _sahib?_" Stella was trembling violently. Her hold upon Hanani was the clutch of desperation, "Who--what was his name?" She felt in the momentary pause that followed that the eyes behind the veil were looking at her strangely, speculatively. Then very softly Hanani answered her. "His name, _mem-sahib_, was Dacre." "Dacre!" Stella repeated the name blankly. It seemed to hold too great a meaning for her to grasp. "So Hafiz told Hanani," said the _ayah_. "But--Dacre!" Stella hung upon the name as if it held her by a fascination from which she could not shake free. "Is that--all you know?" she said at last. "Not all, my _mem-sahib_," answered Hanani, in the soothing tone of one who instructs a child. "Hafiz knew the _sahib_ in the days before Hanani came to Kurrumpore. Hafiz told a strange story of the _sahib_. He had married and had taken his wife to the mountains beyond Srinagar. And there an evil fate had overtaken him, and she--the _mem-sahib_--had returned alone." Hanani paused dramatically. "Go on!" gasped Stella almost inarticulately. Hanani took up her tale again in a mysterious whisper that crept in eerie echoes about the ruined place in which they sat. "_Mem-sahib_, Hafiz said that there was doubtless a reason for which he feigned death. He said that Dacre _sahib_ was a bad man, and my lord the captain _sahib_ knew it. Wherefore he followed him to the mountains and commanded him to be gone, and thus--he went." "But who--told--Hafiz?" questioned Stella, still struggling against unbelief. "How should Hanani know?" murmured the _ayah_ deprecatingly "Hafiz lives in the bazaar. He hears many things--some true--some false. But that Dacre _sahib_ returned last night and that he now is dead is true, _mem-sahib_. And that my lord the captain _sahib_ lives is also true. Hanani swears it by her grey hairs." "Then where--where is the captain _sahib_?" whispered Stella. The _ayah_ shook her head. "It is not given to Hanani to know all things," she protested. "But--she can find out. Does the _mem-sahib_ desire her to find out?" "Yes," Stella breathed. The fantastic tale was running like a mad tarantella through her brain. Her thoughts were in a whirl. But she clung to the thought of Everard as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a rock. He yet lived; he had not passed out of her reach. It might be he was even then at Khanmulla a few short miles away. All her doubt of him, all evil suspicions, vanished in a great and overwhelming longing for his presence. It suddenly came to her that she had wronged him, and before that unquestionable conviction the story of Ralph Dacre's return was dwarfed to utter insignificance. What was Ralph Dacre to her? She had travelled far--oh, very far--through the desert since the days of that strange dream in the Himalayas. Living or dead, surely he had no claim upon her now!