"We ordered our horses the moment we got your note, and ate our breakfasts as they were being got ready. We made a lot of copies of your note, and sent off half a dozen men in various directions with them. Then we came on at once. Of course most of the others cannot arrive for some time yet, but we were too anxious to hear all about it to delay, and we thought that we might catch you before you started, to aid you in your first search. Have you any more certain news than you sent us?" "None," Mr. Hardy said, and then repeated the relation of the survivor. There was a pause when he had finished, and then Mr. Herries said: "Well, Mr. Hardy, I need not tell you, if our dear little Ethel is alive, we will follow you till we find her, if we are a year about it." "Thanks, thanks," Mr. Hardy said earnestly. "I feel a conviction that we shall yet recover her." During this conversation they had been galloping rapidly toward the scene of the catastrophe, and, absorbed in their thoughts, not another word was spoken until they gained the first rise, from which they had been accustomed to see the pleasant house of the Mercers. An exclamation of rage and sorrow burst from them all, as only a portion of the chimney and a charred post or two showed where it had stood. The huts of the peons had also disappeared; the young trees and shrubs round the house were scorched up and burned by the heat to which they had been exposed, or had been broken off from the spirit of wanton mischief. With clinched teeth, and faces pale with rage and anxiety, the party rode on past the site of the huts, scattered round which were the bodies of several of the murdered peons. They halted not until they drew rein, and leaped off in front of the house itself. It had been built entirely of wood, and only the stumps of the corner posts remained erect. The sun had so thoroughly dried the boards of which it was constructed that it had burned like so much tinder, and the quantity of ashes that remained was very small. Here and there, however, were uneven heaps; and in perfect silence, but with a sensation of overpowering dread, Mr. Hardy and his friends tied up their horses, and proceeded to examine these heaps, to see if they were formed by the remains of human beings. Very carefully they turned them over, and as they did so their knowledge of the arrangements of the different rooms helped them to identify the various articles. Here was a bed, there a box of closely-packed linen, of which only the outer part was burned, the interior bursting into flames as they turned it over; here was the storeroom, with its heaps of half-burned flour where the sacks had stood. In half an hour they were able to say with tolerable certainty that no human beings had been burned, for the bodies could not have been wholly consumed in such a speedy conflagration.