eris began. I leave it in your hands."

"I will take Darwan, sir. I don't expect to succeed, but I will do my
best."

[1] Office, study.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE IDEAL AND THE REAL.

The secretary came in with his hands full of papers, and Gerrard left
the office, hardly knowing whither he went. James Antony, sitting in
his shirt-sleeves among the records of his interrupted labours in
another room, took a huge cheroot out of his mouth and called to him as
he passed, but he muttered something unintelligible and hurried on. Up
and down the stone-paved courtyard he paced, much to the perturbation
of the sentry at the gateway, who found the form of madness with which
the Sahib must be afflicted difficult to classify. Gerrard was
wrestling with himself and with the impulse to throw up political
employment altogether and go back to the routine work of his
profession. When he and Charteris left Ranjitgarh together, he had
envied his friend, and wished that his work also lay in the open air
and among unsophisticated children of nature. But now the environment
in which he had spent the past year had left its traces on him,
heightening his natural tendency to proceed by sap and mine rather than
by direct assault, and rendering him still less ready than before to
cut Gordian knots when by any conceivable expenditure of time and
patience they might ultimately be undone. In other words, his Agpur
training had improved his fitness for work of the same kind, but left
him worse adapted than before for the rough and ready methods necessary
for the ruler of Darwan. And he was to succeed Charteris, whose
success in these very rough and ready methods had been pre-eminent, and
who would much have preferred to do the wrong thing at once rather than
the right thing after a lengthy pause.

So much engrossed was Gerrard in his meditations that the jingling and
clanking that told of the arrival of a party of horsemen at the gate of
the Residency failed to attract his notice, and it was not until, as he
turned in his backward and forward march, he came face to face with Bob
Charteris sitting on his horse in the moonlight and solemnly regarding
him, that he realised he was no longer alone. He stood speechless.

"Thought I'd wait and see how long you could keep it up--brown study as
usual!" cried Charteris. "Why, I believe the beggar takes me for a
ghost! Hal, old boy!" bending from the saddle he bestowed on Gerrard a
most