"Oh, no. I don't deal in that sort of ware, thanks. I did not tell you, solely out of consideration for your feelings. I had hoped the thing might have been recovered by this time--then I would have told you. And look here, Cynthia. Would it surprise you to learn that I am getting more than a little sick of this sort of thing. I am not accustomed to being found fault with and hectored every minute of the day. In fact, I'm too old for it, and much too old ever to grow used to it. And since I've been down here this time there's hardly a moment you haven't been setting me to rights and generally finding fault with me. Well, if that's the order of the day now, what will it be if we are to spend our lives together? Really, I think we'd better seriously reconsider that programme." She looked at him. Just her father's warning. But she was too angry for prudent counsel to prevail. "Do you mean that?" she said, breathing quickly. "Certainly I do. It is not too late to warn you that mine is not the temperament to submit to perpetual dictation." "Very well, then. It is your doing, your choice, remember." And turning from him she passed into the house. CHAPTER FIVE. MURAD AFZUL, TERROR. Peaks--jagged and lofty, peaks--stark and pointed, cleaning up into the unclouded but somewhat brassy blue. Rock-sides, cleft into wondrous, criss-cross seams; loose rocks again, scattering smoother slopes of shale, where the white gypsum streaks forced their way through. Beneath--far beneath--winding among these, a mere thread--the white dust of a road. Of vegetation none, save for coarse, sparse grass bents, and here and there a sorry attempt at a pistachio shrub. A great black vulture, circling on spreading wing, over this chaos of cliff and chasm, of desolation and lifelessness, turns his head from side to side and croaks; for experience tells him that its seeming lifelessness is but apparent. "Ya, Allah! and are we to wait here until the end of the world? In truth, brother, we had better seek to serve some other chief." Thus one dirty-white-clad figure to another dirty-white-clad figure-- both resembling each other marvellously. The same bronze visage, the same hooked nose and rapacious eyes, the same jetty tresses on each side of the face, and the same long and shaggy beard, characterised these two no less than the score and a half other precisely similar figures lying up among the interstices of this serrated ridge, watching the way beneath. The dirty-white turbans had been laid aside in favour of a conical dust-coloured _kulla_, the neutral hue of which headgear blended with the sad tints of the surrounding rocks and stones. "I know not, brother," rejoined the second hook-nosed son of the wilderness. "Yet it seems that since the _Sirkar_ [Note 1] has been changed at Mazaran, a great change too has come over our father the Nawab."