sement, half with regret, suddenly
took for him their full meaning. Was it true that there was no change
but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to
acquiescence? He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even
inspired him with a kind of terror. Was he to carry the Road no further
than his father had done? Would another Linforth in another generation
come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the
like futility?

"On the contrary?" he asked. "Then why?"

"That you might stop the Road from going on," said Ralston quietly.

In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had
misjudged his companion. Here was no official, here was a man. The
attitude of indifference had gone, the air of lassitude with it. Here was
a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to
exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle
sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to
the man who served.

"I am to hinder the making of that Road?" cried Linforth.

"You are to do more. You are to prevent it."

"I have lived so that it should be made."

"So you have told me," said Ralston quietly, and Dick was silent. With
each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating
figure. He was so certain, so assured. Linforth recognised him no longer
as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which
overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to
their duty.

"I will tell you more," Ralston continued. "You alone can prevent the
extension of the Road. I believe it--I know it. I sent to England for
you, knowing it. Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at
Kohara--an unfinished, broken thing. Flinch, and the Road runs straight
to the Hindu Kush. You will have your desire; but you will have failed."

There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.
There was more, too. There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly
conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions
and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no
more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed. "I,
too, have lived in Arcady," he added. It twas this last intimation which
subdued the protests in Linforth's mind. He looked at the worn face of
the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and