It was a lovely moonlight night, and my husband and I walked up and down in the garden for some time after our guests had gone. I felt restless and unhappy, but he did his best to reassure me and make me believe that we should all be perfectly safe. Just before we were preparing to go in, the sentry challenged at the gate, and appeared a few minutes afterwards with a Manipuri, who had been sent from the palace to inquire whether we wished to have the nautch or not, saying at the same time that the girls who were to dance were waiting outside in the road if we wanted them. Of course we told him it was much too late to think of such a thing at that time, and the man left the place. We believed that he had really been sent to spy out the land, and find out what preparations, if any, we had been making. If that were his mission, he must have been seriously disappointed, for the whole place, and everyone in it, was wrapt in slumber, with the exception of my husband and myself, and we very often walked about the grounds late on moonlight nights, so there was nothing unusual in our doing so on this occasion. There were a few extra sentries on guard, but chiefly at the back of the house, and the presence of the Chief Commissioner was quite sufficient cause for a larger guard than usual. At last we turned in too, one to sleep as unconcernedly as ever, knowing not that it was his last night upon earth; the other to lie awake, listening to the hours as they were struck out on the gong down at the quarter-guard, and wonder what the ending of the next day would bring. I never closed my eyes all through the watches of that night—the last I was destined to spend in Manipur—and when three o’clock came I woke my husband, and told him that the hour had come when we were all to get up, and the work of day commenced.