Flames! leaping flames! Every part of his body was enveloped in them. They rose above his head, filling his eyes with blood; they made the veins of his body their pathway; he saw them before him, lying in fiery pools on the marble pavement, so that his feet were rooted to the ground and he dared not stir. This for a few moments, during which he fought passionately to regain his self-possession. Then shutting his eyes, he made a dash for one of the marble lattices and laid his forehead against the hard, cold stone. It seemed to him presently that his senses were slipping away from him--that he was falling into a stupor or swoon; and he must actually have lost consciousness for a time; but how long it lasted he could not tell. A breath of cool air, soft and tremulous as the kiss of loving lips, aroused him; and, with a curious sense of refreshment at his heart, he looked out. At first he saw nothing. It was the hollow blackness of a moonless Indian night that smote upon his eyeballs. Then, gradually, he began to see dim ghostly shapes moving in slow procession across the face of the sky. He was aware too of a curious, subdued tumult, multitudinous whisperings, growing, now and then, into a low shriek or wail, and with them a rushing noise as if winged creatures innumerable were sweeping by. With a dreamy sense of relief, which was as incomprehensible to himself as everything else about him, he stood gazing and listening, and the tumult grew; shriller and more piercing were the voices of air and sky; the earth strained and groaned as if the invisible forces hidden within her bosom were struggling for freedom; a mighty wind, that swayed the pendent branches of the banyan-tree in the court below, and shook the withered pods of the acacias, till they rattled like dead men's bones, rushed through the garden. Then, suddenly, everything went. The heavens vanished away in abysmal depths of blackness. The ghostly shapes in the middle air--the dim outline of the trees, the dusty whiteness of the earth--all these were gone. The monsoon had broken, and, in all the world, there was nothing else. * * * * * How they fall--those torrents, those sheets of water, rushing through the air, making the sun-baked earth hiss as they touch it--falling, with dull, delicious splash into the lake! Tom has pressed his face close to the lattice, and put out his hands to catch the drops of water that are running from the eaves of his house. 'Now God grant there are no fugitives abroad to-night!' he says to himself.