aper which had been lying crumpled on
his knee. That had contained the news all the time while they had been
talking about things that mattered so much less.

He did not try to keep it from her. He turned over the paper and found
the page of it which had the latest news. There it was, with its staring
headlines. She seemed to have seen it just so, in another life.

She read it through to the end. It had been an ambush. The small
detachment of troops had been led by the guide into the midst of a large
body of the enemy--it had been surrounded. Captain Langrishe had fallen,
as had a young lieutenant. The men had stood shoulder to shoulder,
fighting desperately. By the most desperate courage they had rescued the
bodies of their officers, which were being carried by the tribesmen into
one of their towers among the hills. They had fought their way back with
the bodies strapped to their horses. Lieutenant Foley proved to be dead.
He had been hacked and hewed with knives. Captain Langrishe had been
more fortunate; the life was still in him when the last intelligence had
been sent down. There was very little hope of his recovery.

Nelly neither cried out nor fainted. When she had finished the reading
she laid down the paper quietly. Her father watched her in mingled
terror and relief. She was seeing it all--the rocky gorge with the
inaccessible hills on either side, filled in with scrub and low trees;
at the little neck of the gorge the dreadful tower; the small body of
Britishers fighting their way step by step backward; the dazzling blue
sky over all. Was Heaven empty that such things happened? She remembered
in a kind of daze that she had been at a garden-party that very
afternoon. She had worn for the first time her white silk frock with the
roses on it and she had seen in many eyes how well it became her. That
had happened in another world. A great gulf stretched between even the
events of the afternoon and this time--this time, in which she knew that
Godfrey Langrishe was dead or dying.

"I wish he might have known," she said quietly, "that after all I was
not engaged to Robin."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FRIEND

Robin Drummond had heard from his cousin's own lips his dismissal. Her
father would have spared her, but Nelly would not hear of that and he
let her have her way.

She told Robin everything in a dull, unmodulated voice, with a
dead-tiredness in it which revealed her unhappiness more eloquently than
word