Quarrels deadly and bloody had taken place beneath its roof. There, too, had the Indian maid listened to the voice of the charmer. English officers had made it their quarters in the balmy days of the H.E.I.C., and its walls had given back the echo of the shouts of many a Bacchanalian revel. Life and death, laughter and tears, storm and calm, had it seen. But it was doomed to witness one scene yet such as it had never witnessed before. In the topmost room of all, up next to the stars, and from the windows of which one looked from a dizzy height on to the roofs of many buildings that rose on all sides, and away over the city to the plains and the broken jungles, and followed the course of the “sacred Gunga,” that, like a silver thread, ran tortuously through the landscape, sat a maid, an English lady. It was Flora Meredith. It was the night of the day upon which Sir Hugh Wheeler had had an interview with Nana Sahib, and she was watching the fireworks that were being let off in the Palace grounds. That is, if one might be said to be watching who looked but saw not; whose eyes, while fixed _there_, were looking beyond, from the past--the happy, bright, and sunny past--to the future, the unknown, the dark, the awful future. Her face was pale, and it seemed as if years had passed over her head since we last saw her, instead of brief, but terrible, days. The rush of events, the sudden changes, the magical transformations, as it were, of those days, had literally bewildered her, and what she did see she saw through a kind of mental haze. Her mother dead, her lover gone, her home destroyed, and she herself forcibly kept away from kith and kin! Surely these things were enough to make sick the boldest heart, and to daze the strongest brain. The journey from Delhi had been a hurried one. The drug administered to her by Jewan Bukht had been merciful in its effects, since it had deprived her of the power of thought for a long time; and since Jewan had conveyed her to this place she had only seen him once. Her wants had been attended to by an old woman--a hag in appearance, a thing of evil in disposition. Her name was Wanna Ranu. She was little, and ancient, and bent; her skin was shrivelled, like unto old parchment; her nose was hooked, her chin beaked. She had long, bony arms, that were encircled with many brass rings; brass bands were fastened round her ankles, and large brass rings were pendant from her ears. She was one of the strange characters to be found in almost every Indian city. Her hatred for the Feringhee was undying. She had drawn it in with her mother’s milk. A hanger-on at the Palace, an unrecognised waif, a casteless outcast, living literally, it might be said, on the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table, if grains of rice could be so designated.