Most wearily passed the time of Malcolm Skene's captivity in the zereba of Moussa Abu Hagil. Weeks became months, and the closing days of the year found him still there, and necessitated to be ever watchful, for both Pietro Girolamo and Hassan Abdullah had, he knew, sworn to kill him if an opportunity were given them; and nothing had as yet stayed their hands but the influence of the Sheikh, who protected him for purposes of his own. Thus his life was in hourly peril; the bondage he endured was maddening, and he could not perceive any end to it or escape from it save death. As for escape, a successful one seemed so hopeless, so difficult to achieve, that it gradually became useless to brood over it--without arms, a horse, money, or a guide. He knew that he must now be deemed as one of the dead by his regiment, by the authorities, and, more than all, by his widowed mother and dearest friends, and have been mourned by them as such. Rumour had said ere he left Cairo that a relieving column was to start for Khartoum. How that might affect his fate he knew not; it might be too late to help him in any way, and to be _too late_ was the order of our affairs in Egypt now. So time passed on, and he was in darkness as to all that passed in the outer world. At last there came tidings which made the Sheikh Moussa eye him darkly, dubiously, and with undisguised hostility--tidings which Malcolm Skene heard with no small concern and alarm. These were the close arrest of Zebehr Pacha as a traitor to the Khedive Tewfik, and his sudden deportation from Cairo beyond the sea to Gibraltar, by order of Lord Wolseley. This event, thought Skene, must seal his own fate as an enforced and most unwilling hostage now! The golden grain, the full-eared wheat and bearded barley had been gathered in every field and on every upland slope around his home; the year had deepened into the last days of autumn; the woods and orchards of ancient Dunnimarle were odorous of autumnal fruit and dying leaves; the skies were gray by day and red and gloomy at eve. White winter had come, and every burn and linn been frozen in its rocky bed; the thundering blasts that swept the bosom of the Forth had rumbled down the wide chimneys of Dunnimarle and swept leaves and even spray against the window panes; while the aged trees in the glen below had shrieked and moaned ominously in the icy winds till winter passed away, and people began hopefully to speak of the coming spring, but still a lone mother mourned for her lost son--her handsome soldier son, ever so good, so tender, and so true to her, now gone--could she doubt it?--to the Land of the Leal! CHAPTER XLIII. A MARRIAGE.