spaces of the moors, was thinking of
Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companion
was furrowing his brow over some knotty problem in his duties.

In Pall Mall there was a lull in the noise, but neither seemed disposed
to talk.

"We had better wait till we get to the House," said Beauregard. "We
must have peace, for I have got the most vexatious business to speak
about." And again he wrinkled his anxious brows and stared in front of
him.

They entered a private room where the fire had burned itself out, and
the lights fell on heavy furniture and cheerless solitude. Beauregard
spread himself out in an arm-chair, and stared at the ceiling.
Wratislaw, knowing his chief's manners, stood before the blackened grate
and waited.

"Fetch me an atlas--that big one, and find the map of the Indian
frontier." Wratislaw obeyed and stretched the huge folio on the table.

The elder man ran his forefinger in a circle.

"There--that wretched radius is the plague of my life. Our reports stop
short at that line, and reliable information begins again some hundreds
of miles north. Meanwhile--between?" And he shrugged his shoulders.

"I got news to-day in a roundabout way from Taghati. That's the town
just within the Russian frontier there. It seems that the whole country
is in a ferment. The hill tribes are out and the Russian frontier line
is threatened. So they say. I have the actual names of the people who
are making the row. Russian troops are being massed along the line
there. The whole place, you know, has been for long a military beehive
and absurdly over-garrisoned, so there is no difficulty about the
massing. The difficulty lies in the reason. Three thousand square
miles or so of mountain cannot be so dangerous. One would think that
the whole Afghan nation was meditating a descent on the Amu Daria." He
glanced up at his companion, and the two men saw the same anxiety in
each other's eyes.

"Anything more of Marka?" asked Wratislaw.

"Nothing definite. He is somewhere in the Pamirs, up to some devilry or
other. Oh, by the by, there is something I have forgotten. I found out
the other day that our gentleman had been down quite recently in
south-west Kashmir. He was Arthur Marker at the time, the son of a
German count and a Scotch mother, you understand. Immensely popular,
too, among natives and Europeans alike. He went south from Bardur, and
apparently returned north by the Punjab. At Bardur, Logan a