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Updated: May 25, 2025
They turned back into the room and breakfasted. Then Linforth lit his pipe and once more curled himself up in his rug upon the straw. Shere Ali followed his example. And it was of the wider plans that they at once began to talk. "But heaven only knows when I shall get out to India," cried Linforth after a while. "There am I at Chatham and not a chance, so far as I can see, of getting away.
And while he hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand. "We know each other, surely. I used to see you at Eton, didn't I? I used to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, Dick Linforth. I am Colonel Dewes." "Yes, I remember," said Shere Ali with some embarrassment; and he took the Colonel's outstretched hand. "I thought that you had left India for good."
"You have come!" she said. Linforth took her little white-gloved hand in his. "You knew I should," he answered. "Yes, I knew that. But I didn't know that I should have to wait," she replied reproachfully. "I was here, in this corner, at the moment." "I couldn't catch an earlier train. I only got your telegram saying you would be at the dance late in the afternoon."
"Shere Ali went away on the day the pitcher was broken," he said. "It was the breaking of the pitcher which gave him the notice to go; I am sure of it. If one only knew what message was conveyed " and Ralston handed to him a letter. The letter had been sent by the Resident at Kohara and had only this day reached Peshawur. Linforth took it and read it through.
Sybil Linforth was now thirty-eight years old, but the fourteen years had not set upon her the marks of their passage as they had upon Dewes. Indeed, she still retained a look of youth, and all the slenderness of her figure. Dewes grumbled to her with a smile upon his face. "I wonder how in the world you do it. Here am I white-haired and creased like a dry pippin. There are you " and he broke off.
A great career, perhaps, perhaps only some one signal act, an act typical of a whole unknown life, leaps to light and justifies the claim the young face made upon your sympathy. Anyhow, I noticed young Linforth. It was not his good looks which attracted me. There was something else. I made inquiries. The Colonel was not a very observant man.
He was actually sympathising with Shere Ali he who had been hottest in his anger. "Shere Ali should have thought of that before," Ralston said sharply, and he rose to his feet. "I rely upon you, Linforth. It may take you a year. It may take you only a few months. But I rely upon you to bring Shere Ali back. And when you do," he added, with a smile, "there's the road waiting for you."
"Let us go on," she said. "I did not know. You see, we have never danced together before. I had not thought of you in that way." She ceased to speak, being content to dance. Linforth for his part was content to watch her, to hold her as something very precious, and to evoke a smile upon her lips when her eyes met his. "I had not thought of you in that way!" she had said.
Linforth moved as he stood at the side of Ralston's desk, but the set look upon his face did not change. And Ralston went on. There came a kind of gentle mockery into his voice. "The shared ambitions, the concerted plans gone, and not even a regret for them left, eh? Tempi passati! Pretty sad, too, when you come to think of it." But Linforth made no answer to Ralston's probings.
He had shown it in his forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It required no answer.
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