Save Zohrab Zubberdust, that handsome, reckless, and wandering Mohammedan soldier of fortune, no visitor at this time came to the fort; and he was openly permitted to see Rose with the other ladies of the family, and occasionally to converse and smoke a cherry-stick pipe with Denzil, who deemed it rash on the part of Shireen to permit them--Rose and himself--to be seen so freely by one who was a paid follower of Ackbar Khan; but the leader of five thousand mounted Kuzzilbash spearmen doubtless felt himself pretty independent in action now. Moreover, since Ackbar's signal defeat before the walls of Jellalabad, his influence had been lessening in Cabul and all the surrounding country; and Zohrab, like many other "khans," who had only their swords and pistols, and, like many other Afghan snobs, that title to maintain, was beginning to wax cool in his service, even as the funds ebbed in his treasury; for Ackbar now had but one hope of replenishing these--the ransom or sale of the captives left in his hands, and each head of these he reckoned at so many mohurs of gold. It was from some casual remarks of Zohrab that Rose and Denzil first learned, with mingled emotions of satisfaction and fear, compassion and hope, that so many more hostages, male and female, were in the hands of Ackbar, and that their own hopes of rescue or ransom were thereby increased. Rose, through the medium of the Khan and of Denzil, overwhelmed Zubberdust with questions as to who these prisoners were. Was her father among them? No description he gave her answered to that of the burly, bronzed, and grizzle-haired "Sirdir Trecarrel;" but there was _one_ "mem sahib," whose appearance tallied so closely in stature, face, eyes, and colour of hair with her own, that knowing as she did all the ladies who had been in the cantonments, Rose could not doubt but that she was Mabel--Mabel, her dear and only sister, who must have been within a few miles of her all those weary, anxious months, and yet neither could know of the other's existence; for Mabel, like all who were with Elphinstone's ill-fated host, had now learned to number all who had loved her with the dead.