There was an Englishwoman alive in the Bibigarh, and Sirdar Khan came back in the night and took her away." "And she is in Mecca now ?" cried Ahmed Ismail.
"Yes.

An old, old woman," said Shere Ali, dwelling upon the words with a quiet, cruel pleasure.

He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily--an old, wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary, so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed she was of his race.

He set another picture side by side with that--the picture of Violet Oliver as she turned to him on the steps and said, "This is really good-bye." And in his imagination, he saw the one picture merge and coarsen into the other, the dainty trappings of lace and ribbons change to a shapeless cloak, the young face wither from its beauty into a wrinkled and yellow mask.

It would be a just punishment, he said to himself.