After the doctor had left, Le Breton sat on Pansy's couch. Yet he had not learnt his lesson.
Although he loved the daughter, he hated the father as intensely as ever. Now he was making other plans; plans that would enable him to keep both love and vengeance. Plans, too, that might make the girl forget his colour and give him the love he now craved for so wildly.
CHAPTER VII
In one of the tents in the glade Sir George Barclay sat, an Arab guard on either side of him. There was an almost stupefied air about him; of a man whose world has suddenly got beyond his control.
The previous afternoon, without any warning, his party had been set upon and captured; but by whom, and why, he did not know. There was no rebellious chief in the district; no discontent. Yet he was a prisoner in the hands of some wild tribe; captured so suddenly that not one of his men had escaped to take word to the next British outpost and bring up a force to his assistance.
There was but one streak of consolation in his broodings—the knowledge that his daughter had not fallen alive into the hands of the barbaric soldiery.
Some little time after he had been brought a prisoner to the glade he had seen Cameron come in, white and shaking with fever.
On seeing his chief, the young man had shouted across the space:
"Thank God! the niggers haven't got Pansy alive."