and made way for them, there came a group of some twenty Nautch girls, in their graceful Indian dress (all so unlike the swathed-up women of the Mussulmen), a single robe folded artistically about them, leaving one bosom and their supple, tapered limbs quite free. The leading Bayadere, though dark as copper, was indeed a lovely girl; but her jetty hair was all glittering with missee and silver dust.

The jewels which loaded their necks, wrists, and ankles, proclaimed them attendants on the court of the Shah,* and were flashing like their own bright eyes in the sunshine, while the coils of their hair of purple blackness, were interwoven with the white flowers of the wild jasmine. Some had vinas, or rude guitars fashioned of half-gourds; and others had tom-toms or little Indian drums, to the sound of which they sung.

As all Nautch dancing borders a little on the indelicate, Rose had now a fair excuse for leaving the vicinity of the band. Denzil sprang into the little seat behind her, as she still insisted on driving, and they quitted the cantonments by the west-gate, opposite the musjeed, where Bob Waller was listening to the distant strains of the music and killing the hours of his duty as best he could; and

* Now, as in the time of the "Arabian Nights," Nautch girls are attached to all Eastern Courts.

thus they escaped Polwhele and a few others who had been waiting to pounce upon her or Mabel, for they were especial favourites with the officers, nathless the ungallant banter to which their names were subjected at times.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DRIVE.

MABEL was not at the Residency, as the sentinels of the Queen's 44th, at the gate, informed them, she having driven away with the Lady of the Envoy to visit Lady Sale, about half an hour before. Denzil perhaps might have foreseen that the sisters would miss each other, had he known more of the inner nature of Rose Trecarrel, or more of the science of flirtation.

"How excessively provoking!" she exclaimed; "shall we return to the band, or-drive without her? Besides we might perhaps meet or overtake them."

The idea of a solitary drive was somewhat perilous at that juncture of our affairs, as the district was much disturbed, and patrols of the 5th Cavalry and 1st Local Horse of the Shah, were on all the roads leading to Cabul. All the people were in arms, and since the murder of Sir Alexander Burnes, more than one officer had been waylaid and seriously wounded. But the temptation was too great, and

Denzil "supposed that they might take a little drive together;" so turning the phaeton from the Residency gate, Rose drove along the Kohistan road, in a direction from Cabul.

A wretched Hindoo Kulassy, or tent-pitcherjust such a creature as one may see shivering in the Strand, singing in a nasal monotone to the beating of his dusky fingers on a tom-tom-cried something in mockery after them-a sign of the times-but they heard him not. The Shah Bagh, amid the luxuriant shrubberies of which the voices of the dove and nightingale were heard at certain seasons; the quaint, old musjeed, where Waller was on guard; the village of Behmaru; a pile of stones marking where an English lady had been thrown. out of her palanquin and murdered by some wild Belooches, who fled, leaving her unplundered, as they deem the blood of a woman bodes disaster to those who shed it, were each and all soon left behind, and they drew near the long and narrow lake of Istaliff, which is about four miles in length, and where Sinclair's boat lay now neglected among the weeds and sedges.

The vicinity of this lake, the only one in Afghanistan, was lonely, and the hills of Behmaru bordered it on the east. There the shaggy goat, bearded like his Afghan master, and the graceful little antelope leaped from rock to rock; there the

long-haired cat and the jabbering ape sprang from branch to branch of the plane and poplar trees, and the beautiful little bird known as the Greek partridge, the hill-chuckore of the natives, whirred up from among the long grass; but save these, and once when a solitary Afghan shepherd peeped forth from his tent of coarse black camlet, pitched on the green mountain slope, there seemed no living thing on their now sequestered path.

Waller, Burgoyne, and others, were older and more showy officers than Denzil, as yet; but it pleased the caprice of Rose Trecarrel to attach him for a time, if not hopelessly, to the train of her admirers; though there was a double risk in the little expedition of that day-the exciting comment among her friends, and the more perilous and equally probable advent of some plundering natives or armed fanatics; yet, heedless of all, the rash girl drove on, looking laughingly back from time to time, with her bright smiling face and alluring eyes, at the lover who sat behind her, striving to speak on passing objects or common-place events, while his soul was full of her, and her only.

Fortunately, no deadly or perilous adventure marked that day's expedition; yet Denzil was fated never to forget it.

Rose certainly was fond of Denzil; but her love affair had, to her, much of the phase of amusement