An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.  
Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner. The doolie was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.
 
Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the darkness. Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the stony blackness and the stars. It was the light of the snows.
 
A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.
 
As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside her, the poshteen in his hand.
 
"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as though she were a child.
 
"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.
 
She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its protective care. He made her feel so completely in his charge that, had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.
 
He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.
 
The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood which had come back to her. She sat listening to his talk with the smiling happy-serious air of youth. And they ate together of the stew with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its bones. And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease, leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.
 
Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself. The approach of action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.
 
Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most delightful she had ever spent. She was tasting for the first time what it meant to feel.
 
The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them, and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their s............