And now he walked behind a tired and indifferent Commissioner, whose very voice officialdom had made phlegmatic, and on whose aspect was writ large the habit of routine.  In this mood he sat, while Miss Ralston prattled to him about the social doings of Peshawur, the hunt, the golf; and in this mood he rode out with Ralston to the Gate of the City.

They passed through the main street, and, turning to the right, ascended to an archway, above which rose a tower.  At the archway they dismounted and climbed to the roof of the tower.  Peshawur, with its crowded streets, its open bazaars, its balconied houses of mud bricks built into wooden frames, lay mapped beneath them.  But Linforth’s eyes travelled over the trees and the gardens northwards and eastwards, to where the foothills of the Himalayas were coloured with the violet light of evening.

“Linforth,” Ralston cried.  He was leaning on the parapet at the opposite side of the tower, and Dick crossed and leaned at his side.

“It was I who had you sent for,” said Ralston in his dull voice.  “When you were at Chatham, I mean.  I worried them in Calcutta until they sent for you.”

Dick took his elbows from the parapet and stood up.  His face took life and fire, there came a brightness as of joy into his eyes.  After all, then, this time he was not to be disappointed.

“I wanted you to come to Peshawur straight from Bombay six months ago,” Ralston went on.  “But I counted without the Indian Government.  They brought you out to India, at my special request, for a special purpose, and then, when they had got you, they turned you over to work which anyone else could have done.  So six months have been wasted.  But that’s their little way.”

“You have special work for me?” said Linforth quietly enough, though his heart was beating quickly in his breast.  An answer came which still quickened its beatings.

“Work that you alone can do,” Ralston replied gravely.  But he was a man who had learned to hope for little, and to expect discouragements as his daily bread, and he added: 

“That is, if you can do it.”

Linforth did not answer at once.  He was leaning with his elbows on the parapet, and he raised a hand to the side of his face, that side on which Ralston stood.  And so he remained, shutting himself in with his thoughts, and trying to think soberly.  But his head whirled.  Below him lay the city of Peshawur.  Behind him the plains came to an end, and straight up from them, like cliffs out of the sea, rose the dark hills, brown and grey and veined with white.  Here on this tower of Northern India, the long dreams, dreamed for the first time on the Sussex Downs, and nursed since in every moment of leisure—­in Alpine huts in days of storm, in his own quarters at Chatham—­had come to their fulfilment.

“I have lived for this work,” he said in a low voice which shook ever so little, try as he might to quiet it.  “Ever since I was a boy I have lived for it, and trained myself for it.  It is the Road.”