'Your father wants you, Azîzan,' she said half in a dream, and the sound of her own voice woke her thoroughly to darkness. Had she been dreaming? The wind rising, now the storm had broken, swept rain-laden through the open door, extinguishing the matches she struck hastily, so that the first glimmering of her own candle was echoed by the ayah's lantern as the latter came paddling over the streaming roof with petticoats held high over her trousered knees, and shrill denunciations of the missy-baba's obstinacy high above the storm. Rose Tweedie's thoughts flew to Lewis Gordon's warning, and his wisdom reminded her of her own foolishness. That was not a dream; and she blushed violently over it as she thrust the photograph out of sight before her attendant rolled the bedding into a bundle and staggered with it down-stairs. As the girl followed ignominiously in the mackintosh and umbrella supplied by that injured official, she told herself she must indeed have had fever, to commit such a ridiculous piece of folly. Her ears tingled over the very recollection of what had perhaps saved her life. Meanwhile, the girl with the Ayôdhya pot, whom Rose, in her absorbing shame, had decided must have been a dream, was stumbling down the broken stairs once more, her courage gone, her chaos of emotion reduced to one heart-whole desire to reach Zainub in safety. How she had crossed the ledge again she scarcely knew; she had dropped the _tändstickors_ on the way, and, as she felt her way step by step in the dark, she was sobbing like a frightened child. Half-way down a displaced brick in the outside masonry allowed the lightning to glimmer over a sort of landing, where she paused for breath. God and his Prophet! What was that huddled up on the next step? She had to await another flash ere she could decide; and in the interval her heart beat with sickening, fearful curiosity. 'Mai Zainub! Mai Zainub!' Her cry of relief and content came swift as the flash. There was no answer save renewed darkness, bringing downright terror with it. Still that was a human form warm under her touch. 'Mai Zainub! Mai Zainub!' There was no flutter beneath the hand seeking the heart. Could she----? Then came a blaze of light, and the familiar face all unfamiliar; the fixed eyes wide open, the jaw fallen. The next instant she was dashing down the stairs recklessly; down and down, out into the open, over the _débris_; anywhere, so as to leave that horror behind. The wind caught her, the rain blinded her, the thunder crashed overhead, as she ran on blindly, till with a cry she slipped on a loose brick and fell, stunned, against a mass of broken masonry. So she lay, looking almost as dead as the poor old duenna huddled up on that landing in the secret stair, where, with one final twinge at her heart, the rheumatism had left her for ever.