been loyal to him. They had
camped as best they could under the shelter of a boulder. It was very
cold. They had no coverings and little food. The place was as desolate as
you could imagine--a wilderness of boulders and stones stretching away to
the round of the sky, level as the palm of your hand, with a ragged tree
growing up here and there. If we had not come up with them that day I
think they would have died."

He spoke with his eyes upon Violet, ready to modify his words at the
first evidence of pain. She gave that evidence as he ended. She drew her
cloak closer about her and shivered.

"What did he say?" she asked.

"To me? Nothing. We spoke only formally. All the way back to India we
behaved as strangers. It was easier for both of us. I brought him down
through Chiltistan and Kohara into India. I brought him down--along the
Road which at Eton we had planned to carry on together. Down that road we
came together--I the captor, he the prisoner."

Again Violet flinched.

"And where is he now?" she asked in a low voice.

Suddenly Linforth turned round and looked down the steps, across the hall
to the glass walls of the restaurant.

"Did he ever come here with you?" he asked. "Did he ever dine with you
there amongst the lights and the merry-makers and the music?"

"Yes," she answered.

Linforth laughed, and again there was a note of bitterness in the
laughter.

"How long ago it seems! Shere Ali will dine here no more. He is in Burma.
He was deported to Burma."

He told her no more than that. There was no need that she should know
that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking
himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as
would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their
honesty. The contrast between Shere Ali's fate and the hopes with which
he had set out was shocking enough. Yet even in his case so very little
had turned the scale. Between the fulfilment of his hopes and the great
failure what was there? If he had been sent to Ajmere instead of to
England, if he and Linforth had not crossed the Meije to La Grave in
Dauphine, if a necklace of pearls he had offered had not been
accepted--very likely at this very moment he might be reigning in
Chiltistan, trusted and supported by the Indian Government, a helpful
friend gratefully recognised. To Linforth's thinking it was only "just
not" with Shere Ali, too.

Linforth saw his companion comi