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Updated: September 28, 2025
But since I have nothing but Dick they hurt me more deeply than is perhaps reasonable"; and she turned towards her companion with a poor attempt at a smile. "What sort of secrets?" asked Dewes. "What is he hiding?" "I don't know," she replied, and she repeated the words, adding to them slowly others. "I don't know and I am a little afraid to guess.
Now, a quarter of a century later another appeal was made by a man sinking, as surely as Luffe had been sinking before, and once again Dewes did not understand. He took Shere Ali by the arm, and said in a kindly voice: "I tell you what it is, my lad. You have been going the pace a bit, eh? Calcutta's no good. You'll only collect debts and a lot of things you are better without.
She led the way across the lawn towards an open window. It was a day of sunshine; the garden was bright with flowers, and about the windows rose-trees climbed the house-walls. It was a house of red brick, darkened by age, and with a roof of tiles. To Dewes' eyes, nestling as it did beneath the great grass Downs, it had a most homelike look of comfort. Sybil turned with a finger on her lips.
But inasmuch as no attempt to mine had been made during the first month, the fear had grown dim. It was revived during the fifth week. The officers were at mess at nine o'clock in the evening, when a havildar of Sikhs burst into the courtyard with the news that the sound of a pick could be heard from the chamber of the tower. "At last!" cried Dewes, springing to his feet.
"Yes, yes"; and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali. "You may use it if you like," he conceded. "Only you would naturally add that it was I who thought of it." Shere Ali smiled and replied: "I won't fail to do that, Colonel Dewes." "No? Then use it as much as you like, for it's true. Out here one remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it.
"I suppose that is what I missed," said Dewes, "not the noise, not the mere crowd you can get both on an English racecourse but the colour." And suddenly before Shere Ali's eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock at Newmarket during a July meeting.
A smile of pride made her face very tender, and as she turned to Dewes he thought to himself that really her eyes were beautiful. "Yes, he passed in very high," she said. "Eton, isn't it?" said Dewes. "Whose house?" She mentioned the name and added: "His father was there before him." Then she rose from her seat. "Would you like to see Dick? I will show you him. Come quietly."
"Have you any influence there?" he asked of Colonel Dewes; and he spoke with a great longing, a great eagerness, and he waited for the answer in a great suspense. Dewes shook his head. "None," he replied; "I am nobody at all." The hope died out of Shere Ali's face. "I am sorry," he said; and the eagerness had changed into despair.
For, whereas on the higher, less encumbered ground the fever had been rarely fatal, the mortality increased with the transfer of the disease to the crowded, damp purlieus of the older part of the town, built more or less on the Dewes, and liable to be invaded by the river in flood.
Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face. "Oh, come, I say!" he protested. "I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!" And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that Colonel Dewes was quite astounded.
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