ded to the dining-room, where breakfast
was set as usual. It was curious sitting down there, drinking
tea and eating toast in an ordinary nineteenth-century sort of
way just as though we had not employed the early hours in a regular
primitive hand-to-hand Middle-Ages kind of struggle. As Good
said, the whole thing seemed more as though one had had a bad
nightmare just before being called, than as a deed done. When
we were finishing our breakfast the door opened, and in came
little Flossie, very pale and tottery, but quite unhurt. She
kissed us all and thanked us. I congratulated her on the presence
of mind she had shown in shooting the Masai with her Derringer
pistol, and thereby saving her own life.

'Oh, don't talk of it!' she said, beginning to cry hysterically;
'I shall never forget his face as he went turning round and round,
never -- I can see it now.'

I advised her to go to bed and get some sleep, which she did,
and awoke in the evening quite recovered, so far as her strength
was concerned. It struck me as an odd thing that a girl who
could find the nerve to shoot a huge black ruffian rushing to
kill her with a spear should have been so affected at the thought
of it afterwards; but it is, after all, characteristic of the
sex. Poor Flossie! I fear that her nerves will not get over
that night in the Masai camp for many a long year. She told
me afterwards that it was the suspense that was so awful, having
to sit there hour after hour through the livelong night utterly
ignorant as to whether or not any attempt was to be made to rescue
her. She said that on the whole she did not expect it, knowing
how few of us, and how many of the Masai -- who, by the way,
came continually to stare at her, most of them never having seen
a white person before, and handled her arms and hair with their
filthy paws. She said also that she had made up her mind that
if she saw no signs of succour by the time the first rays of
the rising sun reached the kraal she would kill herself with
the pistol, for the nurse had heard the Lygonani say that they
were to be tortured to death as soon as the sun was up if one
of the white men did not come in their place. It was an awful
resolution to have to take, but she meant to act on it, and I
have little doubt but what she would have done so. Although
she was at an age when in England girls are in the schoolroom
and come down to dessert, this 'child of the wilderness' had
more courag