Haidee’s eyes wandered from the one face to the other. She noted every expression, she tried to read the thoughts of the doctors, but she did not worry them with useless questioning. But when the examination was completed and lint had been applied to the wound, she grasped the arm of the nearest medical man, and whispered-- “Tell me truly--will he live?” “It is possible,” the doctor answered tenderly. Hope shone again, and, with the words still ringing in her ears, she sank down beside the wounded man, and in an instant was steeped in a death-like sleep. Then loving hands--women’s hands--raised her tenderly and bore her to a couch, and the doctors proceeded to make a more minute examination of their patient’s condition. CHAPTER XIX. FROM CAPTIVITY TO CAPTIVITY. In one of the outbuildings attached to the Rajah of Bhitoor’s dwelling, four natives are seated. It is night. From a smoke-blackened beam, a long, rusty chain swings. Attached to this is one of the primitive cocoa-nut lamps, the sickly light from which scarcely does more than make the darkness visible. At one end of the apartment is a charcoal fire, on which a brass lotah, filled with boiling rice, hisses. The men are sitting, Indian fashion, upon their haunches; they smoke in turns a hubble-bubble, which they pass from one to another. It is a weirdly picturesque scene. The blackened mud walls of the building have a funereal aspect, heightened by the swinging lamp as at the door of a tomb. But the four dusky figures seated round the fire, and reddened by the glow from the charcoal, slightly relieve the sombreness. They would not inaptly represent spirits of evil, holding counsel at the entrance to Tartarus. Their eyes are bleared by the opium they smoke, and, as they converse, the shifting expression of their faces betrays that there is joy at their hearts. But it is not a good joy. It is rather a gloating as they think of the sorrow and suffering of those whom they are pleased to consider their enemies. They are--or so they like to believe--self-constituted avengers of their country’s wrongs, and they would, if it were in their power, write “Death” across the “Book of Life” of every one indiscriminately, whose misfortune it was to have a white skin. To destroy the power of the Great White Hand--in other words, to exterminate the British--is the souls’ desire of these men, as it is possibly of every, or nearly every, native in India on this eventful night. As it is given to man to love, so it is given to man to hate, and the hate of the human heart is beyond human understanding; it has no parallel in anything that draws the breath of life. The savage animals of the forest may rend and tear, but in their nature there can be none of the deadly poison of resentment and hatred which a man can cherish.