and dances and polo--yes, even sacred polo--when he was so dead keen on
this infernal agitation business, and seemed to know such a deuce of a
lot about it all.

Lance himself knew far too little; and was anxious to hear more, for the
intimate, practical reason that he was not quite happy about his Sikh
troop. The Pathan lot were all right. But the Sikhs--his pride and
joy--were being 'got at' by those devils in the City. And, if these men
could be believed, 'things' were going to be very much worse; not only
'down country,' but also in the Punjab, India's sure shield against the
invader. To a Desmond, the mere suggestion of the Punjab turning traitor
was as if one impugned the courage of his father or the honour of his
mother; so curiously personal is India's hold upon the hearts of
Englishmen who come under her spell.

So Lance listened intently, if a little anxiously, to all that Thea's
'mixed biscuits' had to say on that absorbing subject. For to-night shop
held the field: if that could be called shop, which vitally concerned
the fate of England and India, and of British dominion in the East.

Agitation against the sane measures embodied in the Rowlatt Bills was
already astir, like bubbles round a pot before it boils. And Inayat Khan
had come straight from Bombay, where the National Congress had rejected
with scorn the latest palliative from Home; had demanded the release of
all revolutionaries, and wholesale repeal of laws against sedition. Here
was shop sufficiently ominous to overshadow all other topics: and there
was no _gene_, no constraint. The Englishmen could talk freely in the
presence of cultured Indians who stood for Jaipur and Hyderabad, since
both States were loyal to the core.

Dyan, like Lance, spoke little and pondered much on the talk of these
men, whose straight speech and thoughts were refreshing as their own sea
breezes after the fumes of rhetoric, the fog of false values that had
bemused his brain these three years. Strange how all the ugliness and
pain of hate had shrivelled away; how he could even shake hands,
untroubled, with that 'imperialistic bureaucrat' the Commissioner of
Delhi, whom he might have been told off, any day, to 'remove from this
mortal coil.' Strange to sit there, over against him, while he puffed
his cigar and talked, without fear, of increasing antagonism, increasing
danger to himself and his kind.

"There's no sense in disguising the unpalatable truth that New India