Nevertheless, she had not been carried away by the gaieties of this new world.  The fascinations of dance and gymkhana had not caught her.  The joy of being with her father was too sacred and too precious to be foregone for these lesser pleasures, and she very speedily decided to sacrifice all social entertainments to which he could not accompany her.  She rode with him, camped with him, and became his inseparable companion.  Undeveloped in many ways, shy in the presence of strangers, she soon forgot her earlier ambition to see the world and all that it contained.  Her father’s society was to her all-sufficing, and it was no sacrifice to her to withdraw herself from the gay crowd and dwell apart with him.

He had no wish to monopolise her, but it was a relief to him that the constant whirl of pleasure about her attracted her so little.  He liked to have her with him, and it soon became a matter of course that she should accompany him on all his expeditions.  She revelled in his tours of inspection.  They were so many picnics to her, and she enjoyed them with the zest of a child.

And so it came to pass that she was with him among the hills of the frontier when, like a pent flood suddenly escaping, the storm of rebellion broke and seethed about them, threatening them with total annihilation.

No serious trouble had been anticipated.  A certain tract of country had been reported unquiet, and General Roscoe had been ordered to proceed thither on a tour of inspection and also, to a very mild degree, of intimidation.  Marching through the district from fort to fort, he had encountered no shadow of opposition.  All had gone well.  And then, his work over, and all he set out to do satisfactorily accomplished, his face towards India and his back to the mountains, the unexpected had come upon him like a thunderbolt.

Hordes of tribesmen, gathered Heaven knew how or whence, had suddenly burst upon him from the south, had cut off his advance by sheer immensity of numbers, and, hemming him in, had forced him gradually back into the mountain fastnesses through which he had just passed unmolested.

It was a stroke so wholly new, so subtly executed, that it had won success almost before the General had realised the weight of the disaster that had come upon him.  He had believed himself at first to be involved in a mere fray with border thieves.  But before he reached the fort upon which he found himself obliged to fall back, he knew that he had to cope with a general rising of the tribes, and that the means at his disposal were as inadequate to stem the rising flood of rebellion as a pebble thrown into a mountain stream to check its flow.

The men under his command, with the exception of a few officers, were all native soldiers, and he soon began to have a strong suspicion that among these he numbered traitors.  Nevertheless, he established himself at the fort, determined there to make his stand till relief should arrive.