And thus it came to pass that there was yet another night in which Georgia and Flora, unable to sleep, sat together in one of the bleak rooms of the Sarai, and held each other’s hands in an agony of fear and anxiety, while Mabel stole in at intervals from her watch beside Fitz to ask whether there was any news yet. Over and over again the anxious watchers persuaded themselves that they could hear the sound of firing echoed across the miles of desert which separated them from Dera Gul, and on each occasion they assured one another that the idea was absurd. Mrs Hardy came in several times to scold them for sitting up, twice spoiling the effect of her rebukes by administering hot coffee as a corrective, but she knew as well as they did that they could not bring themselves to face the solitude of their own rooms. At last, just as day was breaking, a messenger came from the signal officer at the camp to say that flash-signals of some sort were visible to the eastward, but the mists of the morning made it impossible to read them properly. There was still an hour or so more of weary waiting, and then Dick and Haycraft rode in together, the latter with his arm in a sling. He had been knocked from one of the scaling-ladders by a stone hurled at him, and the bone was broken, but otherwise he was only bruised. And what did even a broken arm signify, when there was victory at last? “It was just as we thought,” Dick told Georgia. “As soon as we were inside the cave, I saw the door begin to come down--shutting out the stars, don’t you know? and a voice called out to us to surrender. But just when the door ought to have descended with a crash, it made a grating noise instead, and stuck fast, for the stones were piled about four feet high on each side. The enemy saw the dodge in a moment, and opened fire through the holes up above, but as we were all in the dark, it was a pretty wild affair. Two or three were wounded, and from the back of the cave came an awful scream--a woman’s scream. It was that wretched Jehanara, who had tried to escape up the staircase, and was shot down by mistake. So now we shall never know--or rather, the General won’t--whether she was deceived herself, or deceiving us. Then, as we got out of the place, we heard the sound of the attack on the other side, and we raced round to take part in it. Our men were already in at the breach the shells have made, and by the time we got up they were fighting hand to hand inside. We pressed the garrison back from point to point, until we came to the zenana. It seems that Bahram Khan had talked big about killing all his women before the end came, but his plucky old mother didn’t quite see it. She and the rest barricaded themselves in, all except Bahram Khan’s wife Zeynab, and kept him out. The fellow made a great fuss about breaking down the barricade, and went off to find a hammer or pickaxe or something to do it with, but we got there first. The men he had left fought to the