For, when he had rifled and destroyed the two mahogany boxes he summed all up his pickings with baffled rage.

"A couple of thousand pounds of notes, a few scattered jewels, the sly old dog has spirited away his vast stealings! My work was all in vain, save the vengeance!" And the oily Ram Lal, in the zenana, drew a willing beauty of Cashmere to his bosom, and hid his face from the chatterers of street and shop.

He was safe from all prying eyes in the Harem.
But, while the triumphant English Mem-Sahibs, of Delhi, shuddered at the bloody details of old Hugh Johnstone's taking off, they found abundant reason to point a moral and adorn a tale.
While the anxious Viceroy was busied at Calcutta, and General Willoughby and Hawke were engrossed with the pompous funeral preparations at Delhi, the ladies of the whole station unanimously condemned the departed.

For a cold and brutal foe of womanhood had died unhonored in their midst, and none were left to mourn.
With much pretentious wagging of shapely heads, and much mysterious innuendo, they spoke lightly of the departed one, and failed not to mentally unroof the Silver Bungalow.

The baffled ladies scented a social mystery! Wild rumors of splendid orgies, strange tales of a wronged woman's vengeance, lurid romances of the flight of the French Countess with a younger lover, after despoiling her aged admirer; all these things were "put in commission" and vigorously circulated.
The principal party interested in these slanders, was, however, now calmly gliding on toward Aden, while the dead millionaire was alike oblivious to the lovely daughter whom he had crushed as a bruised flower, the haughty woman who had defied him in his wrath, and the administration of the million sterling which was the golden monument over his yawning grave! The silk-petticoat Council of Notables in Delhi decided by a tidal-wave of womanly intuition, that the gallant and debonnair Major Alan Hawke would marry "the lovely and accomplished heiress," and so the white-bosomed beauties of the capital of Oude turned again lazily to their respective sins of omission and commission, and to the glitter of their respective booths in Vanity Fair! The club gossips waited in vain for the reappearance of Major Alan Hawke, whose entire personal effects were bundled hastily away to the marble house, where the adventurer now ruled pro tempore.