een formed to search for and rescue such whites in the
disturbed districts who had not already been massacred, and of such it
had found and rescued some. Now it was returning.

Soon it was reported that the scouts had descried something or somebody,
moving among the granite boulders of an adjacent kopje. Field-glasses
were got out.

"By George, it's a woman. A white woman!" cried the officer in command,
nearly dropping his glass from his hand. "She looks the worse for wear
too, poor thing. Another of these awful experiences, I'll bet a dollar.
She's seen us. She's coming down off the kopje. But we don't want to
scare her with all our ugly faces, though. Looks like a lady too, in
spite of her tatters, poor thing," he went on, with his glass still at
his eyes. "Moseley, Tarrant--you might step forward and meet her, eh?
We don't need all to mob her in a body."

"We've met her before, I think, colonel," said the latter, who had also
been looking through his field-glasses. "And that was at
Hollingworth's."

"No!"

"Fact. When we got there she had disappeared, leaving no trace. Great
Heaven, where can she have been all this while? Come along, Moseley."

Great sensation spread through the troop, as it got abroad that this was
the girl whose unknown fate had moved them all so profoundly. Several
were there, too, who had been present at the discovery of the murdered
family, and whose cherished thoughts of vengeance had been deepened
tenfold by the thought of this helpless English girl in the power of the
very fiends who had perpetrated that atrocity.

Under the circumstances, it was little to be wondered at if the voices
of Moseley and Tarrant were a little unsteady as they welcomed the
fugitive, and if indeed--as those worthies afterwards admitted to each
other--they felt like qualified idiots, when they remembered the bright,
sweet, sunny-faced girl, with the stamp of daintiness and refinement
from the sole of her little shoe to the uppermost wave of her
golden-brown hair. And now they saw a sad-faced woman, wistful-eyed,
sun-tanned, in attire bordering on tattered dishevelment. Truly a lump
gathered in their throats, as they stood uncovered before her and
thought of all she must have gone through.

"Welcome, Miss Commerell. A hearty, happy welcome," was all that
Moseley could jerk out, as he put out his hand. "Thanks. Oh yes. We
have met before," with a tired smile, in answer to Tarrant's rather