opes, dangerous reconnoitring, risky
despatch-carrying, scouting, or ticklish night-work. One siege is very
like another--and Ross-Ellison's garrison knew increasing weariness,
hunger, disease and casualties.

Mrs. Dearman's conduct raised Colonel Ross-Ellison's love to a burning,
yearning devotion, and his defence of Gungapur became his defence of
Mrs. Dearman. For her husband she appeared to mourn but little--there
was little time to mourn--and, for a while, until sights, sounds and
smells became increasingly horrible, she appeared almost to enjoy her
position of Queen of the Garrison, the acknowledged Ladye of the
Officers and men of the Corps. Until she fell sick herself, she played
the part of amateur Florence Nightingale right well, going regularly
with a lamp--the Lady with the Lamp--at night through the hospital ward.
Captain John Bruce was the only one who was not loud in her praises,
though he uttered no dispraises. He, a dour and practical person,
thought the voyage with the Lamp wholly unnecessary and likely to awaken
sleepers to whom sleep was life; that lint-scraping would have been a
more useful employment than graciousness to the poor wounded; that a
woman, as zealous as Mrs. Dearman looked, would have torn up dainty
cotton and linen confections for bandages instead of wearing them; that
the Commandant didn't need all the personal encouragement and
enheartenment that she wished to give him--and many other uncomfortable,
cynical, and crabby thoughts. Captain Malet-Marsac loved her without
criticism.

Mrs. Cornelius Gosling-Green, after haranguing all and sundry,
individually and collectively, on the economic unsoundness, the illogic,
and the unsocial influence of War, took to her bed and stayed there
until she found herself totally neglected. Arising and demanding an
interview with the Commandant, she called him to witness that she
entered a formal protest against the whole proceedings and registered
her emphatic----until the Commandant, sending for Cornelius (whose
duties cut him off, unrepining, from his wife's society), ordered him to
remove her, silence her, beat her if necessary--and so save her from the
unpleasant alternative of solitary confinement on bread and water until
she could be, if not useful, innocuous.

Many a poor woman of humble station proved herself (what most women are)
an uncomplaining, unconsidered heroine, and more than one "subordinate"
of mixed ancestry and unpromising exteri