He could not help it, any more than he could have helped the curious transfusion of his own thoughts and ideas with those of another, which had come to him now and then since the night when he wandered unbidden into Grace's rose-garden, and dreamed his dream of fear. It came suddenly too, and without, as it seemed, anything to lead up to it. When, thinking to make a signal to Bâl Narîn, he lifted to his lips the flute-like reed which he always carried, and felt his breath quiver through it, he stepped all at once into another world. Instead of the long shrill whistle he had intended to send forth, it was the notes of a melody, which he had sung a year ago, floating with oars suspended, on the reach of the silver Thames by the lawn of the General's little garden, that stole out on the pestilential air of the wild beasts' haunt--'Come where my love lies dreaming--dreaming the happy hours away.' Was it his own voice--or was it the voice of another? He paused and looked round him trying to collect his thoughts. Ah! to him too the scene is changed. What are these--what are these--that come towards him out of the darkness? Old hopes--old memories, old dreams. He is the Indian rajah no longer--he is the English boy, into whose heart the honeyed sweetness of a new land of promise is stealing. 'My love! my love!' under his breath he whispers the magic words. And then again he lifts the reed to his lips, and again the melody that he dared to sing long ago, close--close to his darling's rose-bower--floats out upon the air. 'Come! Come! Come where my love lies dreaming!' Unconsciously--blindly--he was rushing on. He did not hear the thunder behind him, and the mad cries of Bâl Narîn made no impression whatever upon his senses. Why he swerved aside--how it came about that he should have dashed into the jungle and precipitated himself into the deep nullah that yawned close by, he never knew. He thought he saw the flashing of silver water through trees--this is the only explanation he could ever give. But, meanwhile, as bruised and shaken, he lay in the slime, wondering what had come to him, and bitterly cursing himself for his folly in not being able, at a crisis so momentous, to keep his wits about him, the black army that had been marching in his rear, dashed over the spot where, but a few moments before, he had been tranquilly walking. * * * * *