and in the pale light
the bed was patently empty. Still she did not comprehend. Her eyes
wandered from it to the open window.

When she spoke again it was with the same low whisper, but a whisper
which broke as she breathed it to follow where it might not reach.

"What have they done to you? My darling, God watch over you now!"

She crept back to her room and lay shivering, waiting for the dawn.

BOOK III.

PROLOGUE.

In a chilly dawn, high among the mountains to the north of Berar, two
Britons were wandering with an Indian attendant. They came like
spectres, in curling wreaths of mist that magnified their stature;
and daylight cowed each with the first glimpse of his comrade's face,
yellow with hunger and glassy-eyed with lack of sleep. They were, in
fact, hopelessly lost. They had spent the night huddled together on
a narrow ledge, listening hour by hour to the sound of water tumbling
over unknown precipices; and now they moved with painful cramped
limbs, yet listlessly, being past hope to escape or to see another
dawn.

The elder Briton was a Scotsman, aged fifty or thereabouts, a clerk
of the H.E.I.C.; the younger an Englishman barely turned twenty, an
officer in the same company's service. They hailed from Surat, and
had arrived in Berar on a trade mission with an escort of fifty men,
of whom their present attendant, Bhagwan Dass, was the solitary
survivor; and this came of believing that a "protection" from the
Nizam would carry them anywhere in the Nizam's supposed dominions,
whereas the _de facto_ rulers of Berar were certain Mahratta
chieftains who collected its taxes and who had politely forwarded the
mission into the fastnesses of the mountains. There, at the ripe
moment, the massacre had taken place, Mr. Menzies and young Prior
escaping on their hill-ponies, with Bhagwan Dass clutching at Prior's
stirrup-leather. The massacre having been timed a little before
nightfall, darkness helped them to get clear away; but Menzies, by
over-riding his little mare, flung her, an hour later, with a broken
fetlock, and Prior's pony being all but dead-beat, they abandoned the
poor brutes on the mountain-side, took to their feet and stumbled on
until the setting of the young moon. With the first light of dawn
they had roused themselves to start anew, lingering out the agony:
for the slopes below swarmed with enemies in chase, and even if a
village lurked in these heights the inhabitants would