"Yon Effendi," he resumed, "their hate of us is growing every day. And now, I think, they mean to make a full end of us." For rumours of terrible and wholesale massacres were reaching them every day. Now it was about Sassoun, now about Zeitun, now about Marash and Trebizond, that these things were whispered from lip to lip. Such rumours kept them in a continual state of apprehension and panic; for they knew not what to believe, and had no means of learning the truth. It was easier to know in England what happened in any town of Armenia than to know it in another town of the same country. The Turks of Biridjik triumphed openly; and some of them boasted to their Giaour neighbours that they would soon have all that belonged to them. Some of the Christians thought they were all sure to be murdered; others remembered there had been just such a scare seventeen or eighteen years before, but that then it had come to nothing; so they thought that now also things would just go on as usual, neither better nor worse. Others again thought anything between the two extremes that their fears or their fancies prompted. John Grayson thought, for one, that certainly for the present he would stay where he was. "It is not in the hour of danger one rides away and leaves one's friends behind," he said to himself. More than four years had passed now since his first coming to the country. He was twenty years of age, full six feet with his slippers off, with light brown hair and beard, fair complexion well tanned by the sun, English blue eyes, and frank, fearless English face. Chapter VIII A PROPOSAL He either fears his fate too much, Or his desert is small, Who spares to put it to the touch And gain or lose it all. --_Marquis of Montrose._ Jack often went to the service held daily, a little after sunrise, in the Gregorian Church. So did many members of the household, Mariam, Shushan, and Gabriel especially being constant attendants. One day the returning party was met at the door by Hagop, weeping bitterly. Asked by every one what was wrong, he sobbed out, "The cattle! The cattle!" "What is wrong with the cattle?" "They are not wrong--they are all gone. The Kourds have taken them away--every one." "Every one? The kine, and the sheep and goats as well?" "There's not a cow left to low nor a lamb to bleat of them all. The shepherds have come in, wounded and beaten, to tell us. Grandfather says they did all they could. Amaan! Amaan!" By this time the women were all weeping. For them it meant ruin--almost starvation. But Gabriel touched his mother's hand caressingly, and whispered a word from the Psalm they had just sung in church: "His are the cattle upon a thousand hills." "But that is unbearable!" Jack burst out. "It _has_ to be borne," Mariam said sadly. "We shall see! I cannot believe such things are done--here even--and there is no remedy. A man's whole possessions swept away at a stroke. Hagop, where are the men?"