r felt shy and constrained in her presence, and that, had she
been consulted, she would probably have asked to be sent to England.
But Sir Reginald had been too absorbed in the task before him to spend
much thought on his dead comrade's child at that juncture, and he
had followed the simplest course that presented itself, allowing Nick
Ratcliffe to retain the privilege which General Roscoe himself had
bestowed. Thus Muriel had come at last into Lady Bassett's care, and
she was only just awaking to the fact that it was by no means the
guardianship she would have chosen for herself had she been in a
position to choose. As the elasticity of her youth gradually asserted
itself, and the life began to flow again in her veins, the power to
suffer returned to her, and in the anguish of her awakening faculties
she knew how utterly she was alone. It was in one sense a relief that
Lady Bassett, being caught in the full swing of the Simla season, was
unable to spare much of her society for the suddenly bereaved girl who
had been thrust upon her. But there were times during that period of
dragging convalescence when any presence would have been welcome.

She was no longer acutely ill, but a low fever hung about her, a
species of physical inertia against which she had no strength to
struggle. And often she wondered to herself with a dreary amazement,
why she still lived, why she had survived the horrors of that flight
through the mountains, why she had been thus, as it were, cast up upon
a desert rock when all that had made life good in her eyes had been
ruthlessly swept away. At such times there would come upon her a
loneliness almost unthinkable, a shrinking more terrible than the fear
of death, and the future would loom before her black as night, a blank
and awful desert which she felt she could never dare to travel.

Sometimes in her dreams there would come to her other visions--visions
of the gay world that throbbed so close to her, the world she had
entered with her father so short a time before. She would hear again
the hubbub of laughing voices, the music, the tramp of dancing feet.
And she would start from her sleep to find only a great emptiness, a
listening silence, an unspeakable desolation.

If she ever thought of Nick in those days, it was as a phantom that
belonged to the nightmare that lay behind her. He had no part in her
present, and the future she could not bring herself to contemplate. No
one even mentioned his