egan to sing from the darkness behind him. The melody was plaintive and
sweet; a few notes of a pipe accompanied him; and as Shere Ali listened
in this high valley of the Himalayas on a summer's night, the music took
hold upon him and wrung his heart. The yearning for all that he had left
behind became a pain almost beyond endurance. The days of his boyhood and
his youth went by before his eyes in a glittering procession. His school
life, his first summer term at Oxford, the Cherwell with the shadows of
the branches overhead dappling the water, the strenuous week of the
Eights, his climbs with Linforth, and, above all, London in June, a
London bright with lilac and sunshine and the fair faces of women,
crowded in upon his memory. He had been steadily of late refusing to
remember, but the sweet voice and the plaintive melody had caught him
unawares. The ghosts of his dead pleasures trooped out and took life and
substance. Particular hours were lived through again--a motor ride alone
with Violet Oliver to Pangbourne, a dinner on the lawn outside the inn,
the drive back to London in the cool of the evening. It all seemed very
far away to-night. Shere Ali sat late beside his fire, nor when he went
into his tent did he close his eyes.

The next morning he rode among orchards bright with apricots and
mulberries, peaches and white grapes, and in another day he looked down
from a high cliff, across which the road was carried on a scaffolding,
upon the town of Kohara and the castle of his father rising in terraces
upon a hill behind. The nobles and their followers came out to meet him
with courteous words and protestations of good will. But they looked him
over with curious and not too friendly eyes. News had gone before Shere
Ali that the young Prince of Chiltistan was coming to Kohara wearing the
dress of the White People. They saw that the news was true, but no word
or comment was uttered in his hearing. Joking and laughing they escorted
him to the gates of his father's palace. Thus Shere Ali at the last had
come home to Kohara. Of the life which he lived there he was to tell
something to Violet Oliver.

CHAPTER XIV

IN THE COURTYARD

The investiture was over, and the guests, thronging from the Hall of
Audience, came out beneath arches and saw the whole length of the great
marble court spread before them. A vast canopy roofed it in, and a soft
dim light pervaded it. To those who came from the glitter of the
ceremo