That a great and imminent peril has the effect of nullifying lesser or imaginary ones is a wise provision of Nature. Had it been suggested to Nidia Commerell, say that time the evening before, that she should pass the night all alone in a hole on the banks of the Umgwane River, her reply would have been as unhesitating as it was uncompromising. Not for a fortune--not for ten fortunes--would she have embarked on such an experience, and that with the house and its inhabitants within half a mile. Any one of the half-hundred ordinary terrors of the night, actual or shadowy, potential lions, snakes, leopards--even down to ghosts-- would simply turn her into a lunatic before the hours of darkness were half through, she would have declared. Now, the house was there just the same, but turned into a tomb for the awful remains of those with whom last evening at that time she was in happy and social converse, yet she welcomed the darkness of this hole as a very haven of refuge. But as the night wore on the terrors which came upon the unhappy girl grew more and more acute. Visions of the Hollingworth family, not as she remembered it in life, but as she had seen it in the mutilation and agony of savage butchery, rose before her in the darkness, seeming to point to and suggest her own fate, ghastly and revolting as that which had overtaken them. Each stealthy rustle in the brake--every weird cry of night bird or beast, near or for--carried with it a new terror. A tiger-wolf howled along the river-bank, and although she knew that this brute is the most skulking and cowardly of carnivora, yet it might be different where there was only a frightened and defenceless woman to deal with. Lions, too, were not unknown in that part of the country; but their movements were sporadic, and there had been no sign of them anywhere in the neighbourhood for some time. Still, the horrible bloodshed which had taken place might attract all manner of wild animals; and she shivered with renewed terror at every sound. Soft footfalls seemed to be stealing towards her under cover of the foliage, breathings as of some fierce carnivorum stalking its prey; and there she lay utterly helpless. And then, the appalling loneliness of those dark hours!