From a sergeant of Cecil's regiment--a sergeant who spoke German, and was the same good fellow who had shared with him the flask of raki on the night before the battle--he learned how his friend had been wounded, as well as his horse, and how the latter had borne him out of the field, and been lost to sight in the ravine that opened away deep down on the rear of the right flank. The prediction spoken of by Stanley seemed terribly near verification now, as Fotheringhame searched all the woody ravine, with his heart heavy as lead, for he remembered the farewell messages of Mary Montgomerie, and how, when he left her, the kisses of intense gratitude she bestowed on his cheeks were scarcely less tender than those of his own Annabelle. He searched all the valley, but beneath the deep shadow of the pines, and amid all the wild undergrowth of years, he could see no sign of man or horse--only some croaking kites wheeling lazily in circles--and he turned away, thinking that it was among the blood-splashed wards of the hospitals and ambulance tents, or by the pits where the dead were to be interred, his sorrowful search could only be prosecuted now. CHAPTER XX. SAVED! We have said that when the kites began to assail his dead horse close by him, a cry of great horror escaped the lips of Cecil. Feeble though it was, it reached the ears of Leslie Fotheringhame, just as the latter was in the act of turning, sadly, to leave the wooded hollow. Moving his horse round a clump of wild laurel bushes, he saw a caparisoned charger lying dead, and near it a man in uniform, to all appearance dead also--he lay so motionless and still. Fotheringhame drew near. In the strange brown Servian uniform, with his face pale as death could have made it, and obscured by blood and mud, Leslie Fotheringhame had some difficulty in recognising the young friend he had come so far to find--in knowing again the once happy and merry face that, in times past, had been so often opposite his own at the jovial mess-table; but when he did so, a half-smothered ejaculation escaped him, and a great joy, mingled with greater pity, gushed up in his breast, as he leaped from his horse and knelt beside him. Cecil's eyes were sightless now, and, though half-closed, fixed glassily on vacancy. 'Cecil--Cecil Falconer!' exclaimed Fotheringhame, as he took in his the cold and passive hand; but the sufferer heard him not. 'Life yet, thank God!' he added, as he felt Cecil's pulse, and then his heart, but withdrew his fingers covered with blood. Folding the broad leaf of an acanthus into the form of a cup, he brought therein some cool water from the adjacent runnel, and Cecil drank thirstily again, and again; and then his head sank back, with the eyes still unclosed, yet sightless--seeing nothing and recognising nothing. Fotheringhame took a flask of brandy from one of his holsters, and poured some, with water, between the lips of Cecil, whose head he pillowed on his arm.