Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair. "Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively. "I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting." He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the coarseness and defilement of war. He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction. Rose Chantry noticed--she was learning to notice--that Terrington had not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground, and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed too--but that needed no learning--how the searching hard-browed look of the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after thirty hours of unceasing strain. Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility always endued him with double strength. Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel. Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning, caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation. He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table, and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and back again to her trim figure. "Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles away?" "I am," he nodded.