Alone--alone at Coomassie. Was not this some horrible nightmare, and not a reality, crushing and bewildering? for but two fates seemed to await him. If he did not die of hunger in the wilderness, he would be sure to be tracked and taken; and then, if not killed at once, he would be doomed to a lingering death by torture in Coomassie, or what remained of it--tortures such as devils alone could devise. He made an attempt to stand, but all power of volition seemed to have left him; he fell again into the leafy hollow, and for a time remembered no more. CHAPTER III. THE LOST ONE. And where all this time was Alison Cheyne, after whom--as the chief of our _dramatis personæ_--we must needs look now? When consciousness returned to her, after wildly grasping the bell in the porte-cochère of a large house on that night of snow and terror, and when, fluttering, her white eyelids unclosed, after what seemed a long sleep, she looked round her like a little scared bird, in utter bewilderment, and, believing that she was dreaming, closed them again. A bell ringing at a distance roused her, and she looked again, and became convinced that what she looked on was no dream, and her eyes wandered about with a dazed expression. She was in a little room, with whitewashed walls, and a floor of plain polished wood, on which lay a tiny patch of faded carpet. The sunbeams were creeping through the closed blinds, and a fire burned cheerfully in a little black iron stove. She lay in a pretty bed, with the softest of pillows and sheets; it was of plain iron, and without curtains. Above the mantelpiece, in a simple frame, hung an engraving from Rubens' picture of 'St. Theresa interceding for the Souls in Purgatory,' the three principal souls being--in a spirit of waggery--faithful portraits of the artist's three wives. On one side of this was a little Madonna on a bracket, with a red crystal lamp hung before it; on the other a crucifix, below which was a tiny font of Antwerp china. Other ornaments--save a few flowers in a vase--the apartment had none, and its furniture--two cane-seated chairs and a deal table--was of the simplest kind. In one of the chairs sat a young woman dressed like a nun, with a black robe and white hood, a large bronze crucifix and wooden beads at her cord girdle; her down-cast face had a sweet, placid, and even beautiful expression, and she was sedulously working, with the whitest of hands, at a large piece of gold embroidery on cloth of silver--a portion of a priest's vestments apparently, while glancing attentively from time to time down on her patient or up at two pretty little love-birds in a brass cage. Alison took in all these details at one rapid glance, and great terror seized her that something strange had befallen her, that she was in the care of a nursing sister. 'Where am I?' she said, faintly.