She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head. "It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly. "I can't live another night with the cold. I wished I could die all last night, it was such dreadful pain. I can't stand it any more." For answer he drew her a little closer to him. "God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said. "To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer every hour. You've only to make a fight of it just this one night more--for my sake," he added. She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish, and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it. And so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced the chinks of the tent. He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress, wrapping her up in everything he could find. "You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively. "Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs closer about her. "You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously. Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently. "The moment I can," he said. He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile snow about the skirts of it. Then he went on to the camp. He found everything there very much in need of him. The plans he had made had not been completed. The men, utterly worn out, had flung themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation. Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left undone. Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of his control, which can come from sight alone. They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.