his bonnet, eh?" he whispered savagely.

"No, sir," replied Dewes. "You know the Frontier. I know that."

"And even there you are wrong. No man knows the Frontier. We are all
stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and
their cut-throat ways. The most that you can know is that you are
stumbling in the dark. Well, let's get back to the boy here. This country
will be kept for him, for twenty-one years. Where is he going to be
during those twenty-one years?"

Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the
Political Officer.

"Why, sir, the Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and
Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn--" and Major Dewes
stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political
Officer's face.

"I think you are all mad," said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his
bed and cried with vehemence, "You take these boys to England. You train
them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send
them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to
Eastern ideas, and you think all is well. I tell you, Dewes, it's sheer
lunacy. Of course it's true--this boy won't perhaps suffer in esteem
among his people quite as much as others have done. He belongs and his
people belong to the Maulai sect. The laws of religion are not strict
among them. They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose
caste so easily. But you have to look at the man as he will be, the
hybrid mixture of East and West."

He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry,
and for a little while he was silent. Then he began again, but this time
in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept
the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes' memory for many years to
come. Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken
on any subject with so much wistfulness.

"Listen to me, Dewes. I have lived for the Frontier. I have had no other
interest, almost no other ties. I am not a man of friends. I believed at
one time Linforth was my friend. I believed I liked him very much. But I
think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier. The
Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting
passion. And I am very well content that it has been so. I don't regret
missed opportunities of happiness. What I regret is that I sha