HTER

In the centre of the little frontier fort there was a room which one
and all of its defenders regarded as sacred. It was an insignificant
chamber, narrow as a prison cell and almost as bare; but it was the
safest place in the fort. In it General Roscoe's daughter--the only
white woman in the garrison--had dwelt safely since the beginning of
that dreadful siege.

Strictly forbidden by her father to stir from her refuge without
his express permission, she had dragged out the long days in close
captivity, living in the midst of nerve-shattering tumult but taking
no part therein. She was little more than a child, and accustomed
to render implicit obedience to the father she idolised, or she had
scarcely been persuaded to submit to this rigorous seclusion. It would
perhaps have been better for her physically and even mentally to
have gone out and seen the horrors which were being daily enacted all
around her. She had at first pleaded for at least a limited freedom,
urging that she might take her part in caring for the wounded. But her
father had refused this request with such decision that she had never
repeated it. And so she had seen nothing while hearing much, lying
through many sleepless nights with nerves strung to a pitch of torture
far more terrible than any bodily exhaustion, and vivid imagination
ever at work upon pictures more ghastly than even the ghastly reality
which she was not allowed to see.

The strain was such as no human frame could have endured for long.
Her strength was beginning to break down under it. The long sleepless
nights were more than she could bear. And there came a time when
Muriel Roscoe, driven to extremity, sought relief in a remedy from
which in her normal senses she would have turned in disgust.

It helped her, but it left its mark upon her--a mark which her father
must have noted, had he not been almost wholly occupied with the
burden that weighed him down. Morning and evening he visited her, yet
failed to read that in her haunted eyes which could not have escaped a
clearer vision.

Entering her room two hours after his interview with his officers
regarding her, he looked at her searchingly indeed, but without
understanding. She lay among cushions on a _charpoy_ of bamboo in
the light of a shaded lamp. Young and slight and angular, with a
pale little face of utter weariness, with great dark eyes that gazed
heavily out of the black shadows that ringed them round, such was
M