After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things happened; but there ended the siege of Sar. For Sar is, in the old tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre, the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a girl of a man's heart. For it was to the girl that he surrendered.  
The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not forget?
 
But with his crossing of the Palári, Terrington's achievement ceases. The rest was mere marching. Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road home. But he thought little of such success; he had a natural capacity, he said, for creating false impression............