Dick good-bye at the stile on the further side of the field beyond
the garden.

"You will come down again, and I shall go to Marseilles to see you off,"
she said, and so let him go.

There was something, too, stirring in Dick's mind of which he said no
word. In the letter of his father, certain sentences had caught his eye,
and on his way up to London they recurred to his thoughts, as, indeed,
they had more than once during the evening before.

"May he meet," Harry Linforth had written to Sybil of his son Dick--"may
he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her as I
love you."

Dick Linforth fell to thinking of Violet Oliver. She was in India at this
moment. She might still be there when he landed. Would he meet her, he
wondered, somewhere on the way to Chiltistan?

CHAPTER XIX

A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD

The month was over before Linforth at last steamed out of the harbour at
Marseilles. He was as impatient to reach Bombay as a year before Shere
Ali had been reluctant. To Shere Ali the boat had flown with wings of
swiftness, to Linforth she was a laggard. The steamer passed Stromboli
on a wild night of storm and moonlight. The wrack of clouds scurrying
overhead, now obscured, now let the moonlight through, and the great
cone rising sheer from a tempestuous sea glowed angrily. Linforth, in
the shelter of a canvas screen, watched the glow suddenly expand, and a
stream of bright sparkling red flow swiftly along the shoulder of the
mountain, turn at a right angle, and plunge down towards the sea. The
bright red would become dull, the dull red grow black, the glare of
light above the cone contract for a little while and then burst out
again. Yet men lived upon the slope of Stromboli, even as
Englishmen--the thought flashed into his mind--lived in India,
recognising the peril and going quietly about their work. There was
always that glare of menacing light over the hill-districts of India as
above the crater of Stromboli, now contracting, now expanding and
casting its molten stream down towards the plains.

At the moment when Linforth watched the crown of light above Stromboli,
the glare was widening over the hill country of Chiltistan. Ralston so
far away as Peshawur saw it reddening the sky and was the more troubled
in that he could not discover why just at this moment the menace should
glow red. The son of Abdulla Mohammed was apparently quiet and Shere Ali
had not left Calcutta. The R