and they might have lived happily to the end, had
not Miss. Mary Smith arrived at Maubin. She was
the sister of the Commandant; a good girl, fresh, rosy,
unspoilt; an English maiden, who brought with her
memories of half-forgotten things, o f’ country lanes
and buttercups and blackberries; of rural joys, and
grey churches hidden under immemorial trees. Yet
dear and innocent as she was, tragedy chose to follow
in her train.
As the days passed, the dark lustrous eyes of the girl
amongst the sunflowers widened with pain and dismay ;
for she saw her world, all her world of love and wonder,
falling about her in ruins. And one day the end came.
“ Mah May,” said her magistrate,- “ you are a good girl
B - I am sorry to say good-bye. In this bag you will find
a hundred and fifty rupees. My clerk Maung So is a
rising man. Good-bye,-little one; I am going—to be
married.”
Mah May broke her heart of despair ; but before
she died, she bored a small hole with her dagger in the
gauze. In his chair within, the magistrate, dreaming of
happiness, lay asleep. It is surmised by some that
Mah May put him to sleep. That has never been proved.
But the stark fact remains that the next morning,
when his servants darted in through the swing-backed
doors, they found their beloved master had vanished.
All they came upon was a peculiar-looking object
shrivelled and dry, in a suit ot European clothes, made
by a. tailor in the Strand. The frame-work of bone,
and the crinkled sheet of skin which enclosed it, pointed
469