Waller was, perhaps, not much given to prayer, but his emotions of gratitude to Heaven were great and keen when at last he found himself passing between the Piper's Hill and the old Mosque that stands south of the city, round the walls of which he had to proceed between the Shah's garden and the great citadel to reach the Peshawur Gate, where a guard of Her Majesty's 13th Light Infantry (Prince Albert's own) was posted; and the astonishment of the soldiers, when they heard themselves accosted in pure English by a Hindoo Fakir, was intense; but the officer in command, Lieutenant Sinclair--the same ingenious fellow who had built the pleasure boat during the previous and happier winter at Cabul--now came hastily forward. "Waller--Bob Waller, by all that's wonderful!" he exclaimed, recognising an old friend in spite of his filthy disguise; "so you, too, have escaped, after all?" "Yes, I--but poor Jack Polwhele, Devereaux, Burgoyne, and all the rest, have perished--all--all!" replied Waller, with deep emotion, as the men of the 13th crowded about him. "The bravest and the best are always cut off first; but, save me, all who came through the Khyber passes have gone to God!" "Trevelyan of yours, and Dr. Brydone, of the Shah's army, are safe with us; so three have escaped that terrible carnage." "And what of the hostages?" The face of Sinclair--a Scot from the banks of the Thurso, and, like all his surname, tall, grey-eyed, and fair-haired--grew dark as he replied, "Elphinstone, the general, is dead--he expired in the hands of the enemy, who insulted his body, and beat the head with stones. The tribes are all in arms now--a regular 'gathering of the clans,' we should call it in Scotland. Ackbar Khan has fulfilled his threat, we are told, by sending the ladies for sale to the chiefs in Toorkistan; but nothing is certain save that, by a combined movement on Cabul, we are about to take a terrible vengeance." Waller groaned, and ground his teeth in silence, for he was too much of an Englishman to make a scene, or give vent to the emotions that maddened him as he thought of Mabel, of her helpless companions, and the awful mystery that overhung the fate of Rose. The hostages, to the number of eighty-eight officers and soldiers, with thirty-three females (three being wives of soldiers) and children, were at the mercy of barbarians, and what might have happened to them by that period? How many of them, husband and wife, parent and child, must have caressed and embraced each other despairingly from time to time, with only one idea in their minds,--that the lips they touched, the eyes they looked into with tenderness and love, the form they held, that was warm and living, might all belong to a dead and mangled corpse ere the dawn opened or the night closed! CHAPTER XXIII. DENZIL A NAWAB.