ver the desolate levels through which the
train, with its solitary English passenger, sauntered at the rate of
seven miles an hour. Even this degree of speed was clearly something
of an achievement, attainable only by incessant halting to take
breath--for ten or fifteen minutes--at embryo stations: a platform, a
shelter, and a few unhappy-looking out-buildings set down in a land of
death and silence--a profitless desert, hard as the nether millstone
and unfruitful as the grave.

During these pauses the fret and jar of the labouring train gave place
to a babel of voices--shouting, expostulating, denunciating in every
conceivable key. For the third-class passenger in the East is nothing
if not vociferous, and the itch of travel has penetrated even to these
outskirts of empire.

Sleep, except in broken snatches, was a blessing past praying for,
and as the moon swung downward to the hills, Honor Meredith had
settled herself at the open window, to watch the lifeless wastes glide
silently past, and await the coming of dawn.

She had been journeying thus, with only moon and stars, and unfamiliar
scenes of earth for company, since eight o'clock; and morning was near
at hand. The informal civilisation of Rawal Pindi lay fifty miles
behind her; and five miles ahead lay Kushalghur, a handful of
buildings on the south bank of the Indus, where the narrow line of
railway came abruptly to an end. Beyond the Indus a lone wide
cart-road stretched, through thirty miles of boulder-strewn desert, to
the little frontier station of Kohat.

For six years it had been Honor's dream to cross the Indus and join
her favourite brother, the second-in-command of a Punjab cavalry
regiment; to come into touch with an India other than the
light-hearted India of luxury and smooth sailing, which she had
enjoyed as only daughter of General Sir John Meredith, K.C.B., and
now, with the completion of her father's term of service, her dream
had become an almost incredible reality.

It was not without secret qualms of heart and conscience that the
General had yielded to her wish. For frontier life in those earlier
times still preserved its distinctive flavour of isolation and hazard,
which has been the making of its men, and the making or marring of its
women; and which the northward trend of the "fire-carriage" has almost
converted into a thing of the past. But sympathy with her mettlesome
spirit, which was of his own bestowing, had outweighed Sir John's