To the philosophic and somewhat cynical Payne this interview was an uncomfortable one, while Hoste subsequently pronounced it to be the most trying thing he had ever gone through in his life. "Is there absolutely no hope?" Eanswyth had said, in a hard, forced voice. The two men looked at each other. "Absolutely none, Mrs Carhayes," said Payne. "It would be sham kindness to tell you anything different. Escape was an impossibility, you see. Both their horses were killed and they themselves were surrounded. Hoste and I only got through by the skin of our teeth. If our horses had `gone under' earlier it would have been all up with us, too." "But the--but they were not found, were they? They may have been taken prisoners." Again the two men looked at each other. Neither liked to give utterance to what was passing through his mind. Better a hundredfold the unfortunate men were dead and at rest than helpless captives in the hands of exasperated and merciless savages. "Kafirs never do take prisoners," said Payne after a pause. "At least, never in the heat and excitement of battle. And it is not likely that Carhayes or Milne would give them a chance, poor chaps." "You mean--?" "They would fight hard to the bitter end--would sell their lives dearly. I am afraid you must face the worst. I wish I could say otherwise, but I can't. Eh, Hoste?" The latter nodded. He had very willingly allowed the other to do all the talking. Then, as all things come to an end sooner or later--even Wigmore Street--so eventually did this trying interview. "I say, George. That just was a bad quarter of an hour," said Hoste, as the two companions-in-arms found themselves once more in their favourite element--the open air, to wit. "I don't want to go through it again many times in a lifetime. If ever there was `broken heart,' writ large in any woman's face, it is on that of poor Mrs Carhayes. I believe she'll never get over it." Payne, who had shown himself far from unfeeling during the above-mentioned trying interview, regarded this remark as a direct challenge to the ingrained cynicism of his nature. "You don't, eh?" he replied. "Well, I don't want to seem brutal, Hoste, but I predict she'll be patching up that same `broken heart' in most effective style at some other fellow's expense, before the regulation two years are over. They all do it. Lend us your 'bacco pouch." Hoste said nothing. But for that little corner of the curtain of her suspicions which his wife had lifted on the first night of Eanswyth's arrival, he might have been three parts inclined to agree with his friend. As things stood, he wasn't.