le of stringed instruments
and the love-songs of some sultan's favorite--now fallen into ruins,
or rebuilt to stable horses or shelter guns and stores and men; but
eloquent in all their new-smeared whitewash, or in crumbling decay, of
long-since dead intrigue. No places, those, for strong men to live alone
in, where night-breezes whisper through forgotten passages and dry teak
planking recreaks to the memory of dead men's footsteps.

But strong men are not the only makings of an Empire, nor yet the only
sufferers. Wherever the flag of England flies above a distant outpost
or droops in the stagnant moisture of an Eastern swamp, there are the
graves of England's women. The bones that quarreling jackals crunch
among the tombstones--the peace along the clean-kept borderline--the
pride of race and conquest and the cleaner pride of work well done,
these are not man's only. Man does the work, but he is held to it and
cheered on by the girl who loves him.

And so, above a stone-flagged courtyard, in a room that once had echoed
to the laughter of a sultan's favorite, it happened that an English
girl of twenty-one was pacing back and forth. Through the open curtained
window she had seen her husband lead his command out through the echoing
archway to the plain beyond; she had heard his boyish voice bark out the
command and had listened to the rumble of the gun-wheels dying in the
distance--for the last time possibly. She knew, as many an English girl
has known, that she was alone, one white woman amid a swarm of sullen
Aryans, and that she must follow along the road the guns had taken,
served and protected by nothing more than low-caste natives.

And yet she was dry-eyed, and her chin was high; for they are a strange
breed, these Anglo-Saxon women who follow the men they love to the
lonely danger-zone. Ruth Bellairs could have felt no joy in her
position; she had heard her husband growling his complaint at being
forced to leave her, and she guessed what her danger was. Fear must have
shrunk her heartbeats and loneliness have tried her courage. But there
was an ayah in the room with her, a low-caste woman of the conquered
race; and pride of country came to her assistance. She was firm-lipped
and, to outward seeming, brave as she was beautiful.

Even when the door resounded twice to the sharp blow of a saber-hilt,
and the ayah's pock-marked ebony took on a shade of gray, she stood like
a queen with an army at her back and neither