to hide it from observation, or to shut out some terrible sight from her view. Yet to herself there was an unreality about the whole, which she could neither comprehend, nor account for. Most of all about her parents: were they indeed alive, or was their sudden appearance on the day of the Sutee, a reality, or a trick of imagination was all she retained in her mind one of the hideous dreams of her illness rather than a fact? Who was to tell her the truth? All that Fazil had heard from the hunchback, he had told to Tara as they rested here and there in their escape; but her own mind was then in that state of terror and confusion that she could tell him nothing, nor, indeed, could she find courage to speak to him at all. Long before, when they had been together in camp, she had never dared to answer him. It was enough for her that he spoke, and that she listened. Her mind, as he rode with her that night before him—for he would trust her to no one- -was sorely unhinged. That she had escaped death she knew; that she was with him she knew also that she feared pursuit, and might be taken and burned alive, was an absorbing terror, which shut out the shame of her flight; and it was perhaps a happy circumstance that the fever, which had so long affected her brain, shut out all realities till she was stronger, and calmer to bear them. CHAPTER XXVII. : DAY by day, as strength returned to Tara, remembrance returned also. It might have been with abhorrence of her present position-with dread of her broken vows-with terror of the Mother's vengeance, and with a sense of her own pollution as an escaped Sutee— which would have utterly overwhelmed her with remorse, and forbidden recovery at all; and in such a case, death would have been welcome. We will not say that there was no revulsion of feeling it would have been unnatural in one with so fine an intellect as Tara possessed, had there been no struggle. Perhaps the new life to which she awakened, after the illness she had undergone, had blunted the perceptions of the old; perhaps, as Zyna and Lurlee told her, that it was her destiny, which she could not resist; and that, if she were to have died, as her creed had determined, could Fazil have prevented it ?—would she have been delivered at all? Had she not already undergone the pains of death in preparation for it, and been delivered from them? Then Lurlee again brought forth her books, and went over all her old calculations, and there were the priest's also with them, all tending to the same point. If her faith had been shaken for a time, in the fact that Afzool Khan had died, when the planets showed that he should be victorious, might there not have been some mistake? Here at least there was none; none in the restoration of her child, as she called Tara, from death to life-none in her having been rescued from the evil idolaters and Kafirs, to be newly born into the true faith, acceptable to Alla and the Prophet. All this was very plain and incontrovertible. : Could Tara deny it? It was not clear that she even attempted to do so and ever nigh her, were anxious pleaders against any justification of the rites of her own faith, from the most horrible consummation of which, she could not possibly have escaped. "Even your father and mother could not have saved you had they desired it," argued Zyna, "from dying in the fire before them they would have seen you burned, and shouted 'Jey Kalee!' with the rest, to drown the scream of your dying agony; but they would not have relented." No; Tara's heart told her they would not have relented, and she must have perished, but for Fazil. And when he pleaded?—It was long before he attempted it; but it was at last irrepressible. More than his sister and Lurlee, he knew what struggle would ensue in Tara's heart if she were called upon too suddenly to renounce her own faith; for he had lived, young as he still was, more in the world. On this point, he had as yet forborne to address her at all. But such love as his for the deserted girl, must be spoken by himself. Lurlee and Zyna had told him all they had said, and it seemed strange to both that he was silent; but, he had judged rightly. What the girl could bear from them, could not have been endured from him till her bodily strength assisted her mind to bear it, and he waited his opportunity. It was the first time she had ever mentioned her own affairs; almost the only time she had spoken freely at all. She had reverted to the past, to the day of the attack on Tooljapoor, and to Fazil's recovery of her mother's ornaments; for the Bramhun women had bathed her that day, and she had performed some simple ceremonies of her faith for purification after her illness, and charitable gifts had been distributed by Fazil and Lurlee on her behalf. So she had suffered Zyna to twist a garland of flowers into her hair as she used to do in camp, and to put on her some of the old ornaments which, while she was yet decked for the Sutee, had been brought away with her: and when Fazil, who had been absent all day in the camp, returned before sunset for the evening prayer, he found her talking earnestly with his sister. Still pale, but only showing the traces of illness in the purity of her colour, Tara had perhaps never looked more lovely than in the resumption of some of her former richness and elegance of costume; and as Fazil entered the court, for the moment unobserved by her and Zyna who were seated together, he stopped involuntarily to regard her. Tara would have fled when they saw him, but Zyna would not have it so. "Look," she said, " brother, is she not like herself once more? See how I have decked her for her sacrifice of thanks to-day! Surely all that is past is as a dream, and Tara is again what she was the evening she was taken away from us. Is she not, brother? not changed?" She is "Yes," he said, “ changed, I think, in spirit in her new life, as we had hoped-that is all! Tara, sit down : we will all remain together, and you must hear me now, with Zyna as witness. "There is nothing new to say," he continued, after a pause" nothing. It is only the old tale, once told before, when you believed it: and it is not changed, only confirmed. Ah! we have both been tried since; and if out of that trial you have come, like me, strengthened, then there is no doubt. Tara! in the deadly struggle by that hideous pile, with the crash of music, and frantic screams of the people in your ears, even then your heart bore witness to me that I was true. Am I false now?" "O no, no, no!" cried the girl, throwing herself uncontrollably at his feet, after her old Hindu fashion. "Not false, not false ! You are my lord and my saviour, and I worship you! I will be your slave, your servant, for my life, and Zyna knows it; but consider_" "Not thus, beloved," he said, gravely but kindly stooping and raising her up, "will I hear that, but |