Mabel wondered very much what Georgia’s thoughts were at this time. She never alluded to the wild impulse which had led her to try and leave the fort, but she seemed to shrink into herself, and liked to be left alone with the baby for hours. When her friends came to speak to her, she showed an impatience that surprised them, until at last, in a burst of contrition for the irritation she had shown, she explained that she was listening for Dick’s voice. She could hear it sometimes when the baby and she were alone together, but if there were other people in the room, their voices seemed to drown it. “What did he say?” Mabel ventured to ask, awed by her sister-in-law’s tone of absolute conviction, and Georgia confessed, with some disappointment, that he had not said anything particular. It was as if they were just talking together as usual about things in general, and the conversation would break off abruptly, as if she was waking out of a dream. Mabel was disappointed also. If Dick could really speak to his wife from the dead, surely he would communicate his wishes about the boy’s bringing-up, or some subject of similar importance; but this casual talk--what could it be but a delusion of Georgia’s troubled brain, which could not distinguish between dreams and realities? In the meantime, the reconnaissance which Fitz had made in company with Sultan Jān was not entirely destitute of results. The news that a mine was in course of construction had alarmed Colonel Graham more than he cared to show, although the most careful investigations possible in the circumstances went to prove that the tunnel had not at present reached the neighbourhood of the walls. Runcorn, who took the matter very much to heart, regarding it as a sign that he had not been sufficiently on the alert, obtained permission to make a solitary reconnaissance on two successive nights, and managed on the second occasion to creep across the cleared space, and up to the very walls of General Keeling’s house. By dint of long and careful listening, with his ear to the ground, he satisfied himself that work was going on briskly, but that the tunnel was not yet nearly long enough to threaten the east curtain. After this, he held much consultation with Fitz, and the two formulated a desperate scheme. They proposed to creep into the enemy’s entrenchments, carrying with them a supply of explosives, and blow up the mine before it was carried any farther, destroying at the same time General Keeling’s house, in the compound of which was the entrance shown to Fitz. The Colonel vetoed the plan promptly, but its inventors were not to be discouraged, and produced a fresh modification of it every day, until circumstances intervened with decisive effect to prevent its execution.