When the Rajah saw him, he said, 'O pity, pity! that so brave and handsome a boy should have come dying after this girl. Yet he is but one of the thousands of thousands who have thus died to no purpose. Pull up the spears and cast them into the seven ditches, for they shall remain no longer.'
Then he commanded two palanquins to be prepared, and men in readiness to carry them, and said, 'Let the girl be married to the young Rajah, and let both be taken far away into the jungle, that we may never see them more. Then there will be quiet in the land again.'
The Ranee, Panch-Phul Ranee's mother, cried bitterly at this, for she was very fond of her daughter, and she begged her husband not to send her away so cruelly—the living with the dead; but the Rajah was inexorable. 'That poor boy died,' he said; 'let my daughter die too. I'll have no more men killed here.'
So the two palanquins were prepared. He placed his daughter in the one, and her dead husband in the other, and said to the palkee-bearers, 'Take these palkees and go out into the jungle until you have reached a place so desolate that not so much as a sparrow is to be seen, and there leave them both.'
And so they did. Deep down in the jungle, where no bright sun could pierce the darkness, nor human voice be heard, far from any habitation of man or means of supporting life, on the edge of a dank, stagnant morass, that was shunned by all but noisome reptiles and wandering beasts of prey, they set them down and left them, the dead husband and the living wife, alone to meet the horrors of the coming night—alone, without a chance of rescue.
Panch-Phul Ranee heard the bearers' retreating footsteps, and their voices getting fainter and fainter in the distance, and felt that she had nothing to hope for but death.
Night seemed coming on apace, for though the sun had not set, the jungle was so dark that but little light pierced the gloom—and she thought she would take a last look at the husband her vow had killed, and sitting beside him wait till starvation should make her as he was, or some wild animal put a more speedy end to her sufferings.
She left her palkee and went towards his. There he lay with closed eyes and close-shut lips; black curling hair, which escaped from under his turban, concealed a ghastly wound on his temple. There was no look of pain on the face, and the long sweeping eye-
