g; orgies of slaughter and miracles of
high-hearted devotion....

Barbaric; utterly foreign to life, as he had lived it, those tales of
ancient India most strangely awakened in him a vague, thrilling sense of
familiarity ... He _knew_...! Most clearly he knew the spirit that fired
them all, when Akbar's legions broke, wave on wave, against the mighty
rock-fortress of Chitor--far-famed capital of Mewar, thrice sacked by
Islam and deserted by her royal house; so that only the ghost of her
glory remains--a protest, a challenge, an inspiration....

Sometimes he dreamed it all, with amazing vividness. And in the dreams
there was always the feeling that he knew ...It was a very queer, very
exciting sensation. He had spoken of it to no one but his mother and
Tara; except once at Marlborough, when he had been moved to try whether
Lance would understand.

Priceless old Desmond! It had been killing to watch his
face--interested, sceptical, faintly alarmed, when he discovered that it
was not an elaborate attempt to pull his leg. By way of reassuring him,
Roy had confessed it was a family failing. When things went wrong his
mother nearly always knew: and sometimes she came to him, in dreams that
were not exactly dreams. What harm?

Desmond, puzzled and sceptical, was not prepared to hazard an opinion.
If Roy was made that way, of course he couldn't help it. And Roy, half
indignant, had declared he wouldn't for worlds be made any other way....

To-night, by some freak of memory, it all came back to him through the
dream-inducing haze of tobacco smoke. And there, on his writing-table,
stood a full-length photograph of Lance in Punjab cavalry uniform.
Soldiering on the Indian Border, fulfilling himself in his own splendid
fashion, he was clearly in his element; attached to his father's old
regiment, with Paul for second-in-command; proud of his strapping Sikhs
and Pathans; watched over, revered and implicitly obeyed by the sons of
men who had served with his father--men for whom the mere name Desmond
was a talisman. For that is India's way.

And here was he, Roy, still at his old trick of scribbling poems and
dreaming dreams. For a fleeting moment, Desmond was out of the picture;
but when time was ripe he would be in it again. The link between them
was indestructible--elemental. Poet and Warrior; the eternal
complements. In the Rig Veda[2] both are one; both _Agni Kula_--'born of
fire'; no fulness of life for the one without the