"
Phyllis had her hands clasped about Desmond's arm.
"Is he dead?" she asked in a voice of awe.
"Come away," said Desmond quietly, leading her toward the house. "Let us
find your mother."
Chapter 31: In which friends meet, and part: and our hero hints a proposal.
The fight was over. It was Diggle's quarrel; neither the Frenchmen nor
the natives had any concern in it, and when their leader was dead they
had no more interest in continuing the struggle. They drew off; the weary
defenders collected the dead and attended to the wounded; and Desmond
went into the house.
"God bless you, Mr. Burke!" said Mrs. Merriman, tears streaming from her
eyes as she met him and clasped his hands. "You are not hurt?"
"Just a scratch or two, ma'am: nothing to trouble about."
But the ladies insisted on bathing the two slight wounds on head and arm
which in the heat of the fight he had not noticed. And then Mrs. Merriman
told him all that had happened since the day he left them in such merry
spirits at Khulna. How they had been trapped by Diggle, pretending to be
a Monsieur de Bonnefon: how he had conveyed them to the house of his
friend Sinfray: how after many months their whereabouts had been revealed
to Surendra Nath by one of his numerous relatives, a man who had a
distant cousin among Sinfray's servants: how the Babu, displaying
unwonted energy, had come with a number of friends and fallen unawares
upon their captors, afterward taking them to a house of his father's in
this village: how the old man and his son had both been stricken with
jungle fever, and the father died, and when the Babu lay helpless and
unconscious on his sickbed they had found no means of communicating with
their friends.
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