Take counsel! Ferrers had meant to do it; but even as he began to pace to and fro, with the sleeping city outspread all around him, he knew that the matter was decided already--had been decided from the moment when he withheld the words he had tried to utter to Whybrow. The test was more than flesh and blood could stand. In open day, Ferrers could have charged alone into an overwhelming host of enemies, and died gloriously. Had he lived in earlier days, he could have faced the lions in the amphitheatre, unarmed, and not have flinched, or have fought as a gladiator and received his death-blow by command of the audience without a sign of fear. But die slowly by inches underground, submit to be eaten alive by vermin, perish unknown, unhonoured, this he could not do. If only he had had companions in misfortune, if even Whybrow and he could have stood shoulder to shoulder from the first, and encouraged one another, it would have been different, but there was not a creature within hundreds of miles to whom steadfastness on his part would seem anything but foolishness. As the Mirza had said, no one in the world he had left would ever know whether he had died a hero or lived a craven; and if they did, what good would it do him? Penelope, who ought to care, would expect him to hold out. He felt angrily that if Penelope had loved him better he might have been a better man, even able to hold out, perhaps. It would have been something, on the other hand, to be able to assure himself that she would wish him to yield, but he could not take this comfort. And, after all, what was he giving up? To trample on the cross, to curse the claims of Christ--these were disagreeable things to do, but, as the Mirza had said, they had no particular poignancy for him. With Colin it would have been different, of course. Christ was more than a name to him, Christianity other than a mere set of formulæ. But how could it be expected of Ferrers--could any one in his senses ask it--that he should die for Colin’s faith? CHAPTER XVII. THE STRENGTH OF TEN. For some months after Ferrers’ departure for Gamara, Colin was kept a prisoner by the wounds received in the unsuccessful first attack on Shir Hussein’s stronghold. Lady Haigh had insisted that he should be brought to the fort, and she and Penelope nursed him unweariedly. His convalescence was long and tedious, and complicated by attacks of fever; but he exhibited a constant patience which, as Lady Haigh said, was nothing but a reproach to ordinary mortals, and only showed what terrible people the Martyrs must have been to live with. From the first return to consciousness, his question was always for news of Ferrers; and when he was at last promoted from his bedroom to a couch in the drawing-room, he was still eager on the subject. “Have you had many letters from George, Pen?” he asked his sister the very first day. “Two, I think. No, there must have been three,” she answered indifferently.