So the old General was left unburied in the Pass, and Mabel was smoothing caressingly with her fingers and then treasuring in her bosom, a thin lock of his silver hair, which Audley had cut for her, and which recalled the dead so powerfully in presence, as it were, that her heart seemed to brim with tears. There was no relic left of him now save this; unless we add a pair of his pipeclayed gloves, which he had given her to draw over her own for warmth, and somehow, they too seemed to embody his presence, and to bring before her by their very shape, the kind old hands that never tired of caressing her and Rose from infancy--the hands of him who was left without a grave in yonder fatal place, for the army was again in full retreat, and leaving, even as it left all yesterday, its dead and dying on every hand. Audley thought with intense compassion of Sybil, whose previous bereavement he had learned from Waller; and all unused to grief, he rode among the Staff in a state of utter bewilderment, considering whether he should write her, and if so, in what terms he was to tell her of her loss. For a time Mabel clung to Waller's neck, in her great despair of mind, like one in dreadful bodily agony. She cared not for onlookers; for the men of the 44th, or the sepoys, with their black glossy wondering eyes. "Oh, Waller; I have no friend in the world now--no friend but you!" said she, in a strange and weak voice, as she laid her face, thinned and paled by grief and suffering, on his breast. Waller's bright blue eyes were dry now; but in their expression tenderness alternated with something akin to ferocity, for all this suffering, and all those deaths that were occurring hourly, were the result of Afghan treachery; and his fair English face seemed to darken as he looked back to where Denzil, the General, and so many more were lying, and the interment of whom was impossible. The enemy was coming on, the bugles were sounding for the advance--if a retrograde movement can be called so--and already the whole force was _en route_ towards Khoord Cabul. Mabel was soon once more on horseback, and rode with the rest of the ladies, many of whom were widows now, and could share their grief with her. Her heart had "Fallen too low for special fear;" to her acute mental misery a kind of apathetic stupor followed, and she was in that state as the Retreat again began. CHAPTER XX. IN THE KHYBER PASS. We almost shrink from the task of telling the story of that awful retreat, in which the Rider on the Pale Horse followed the steps of our troops, so closely, so terribly, and in such ghastly triumph!