The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks. At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and, from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded. The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the anxiety about his sight. It was perhaps sheer determination which kept him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue. Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed. By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit, and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and the south. But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect. Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks. In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill. She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her, shivering. She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her. "My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen." He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground, searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh. But though her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling at his tenderness and crying with pain. But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance. The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that she did not want to eat. Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his arm supportingly about her shoulders. "I'm going to feed you," he said.