Once more disappointment seized upon Dick Linforth, and he found it all the more bitter in that he had believed a minute since that his dreams were to be fulfilled.  He looked down upon Peshawur, and the words which Ralston had lately spoken, half in amusement, half with regret, suddenly took for him their full meaning.  Was it true that there was no change but the change from the young woman to the old one, from enthusiasm to acquiescence?  He was young, and the possibility chilled him and even inspired him with a kind of terror.  Was he to carry the Road no further than his father had done?  Would another Linforth in another generation come to the tower in Peshawur with hopes as high as his and with the like futility?

“On the contrary?” he asked.  “Then why?”

“That you might stop the Road from going on,” said Ralston quietly.

In the very midst of his disappointment Linforth realised that he had misjudged his companion.  Here was no official, here was a man.  The attitude of indifference had gone, the air of lassitude with it.  Here was a man quietly exacting the hardest service which it was in his power to exact, claiming it as a right, and yet making it clear by some subtle sympathy that he understood very well all that the service would cost to the man who served.

“I am to hinder the making of that Road?” cried Linforth.

“You are to do more.  You are to prevent it.”

“I have lived so that it should be made.”

“So you have told me,” said Ralston quietly, and Dick was silent.  With each quiet sentence Ralston had become more and more the dominating figure.  He was so certain, so assured.  Linforth recognised him no longer as the man to argue with; but as the representative of Government which overrides predilections, sympathies, ambitions, and bends its servants to their duty.

“I will tell you more,” Ralston continued.  “You alone can prevent the extension of the Road.  I believe it—­I know it.  I sent to England for you, knowing it.  Do your duty, and it may be that the Road will stop at Kohara—­an unfinished, broken thing.  Flinch, and the Road runs straight to the Hindu Kush.  You will have your desire; but you will have failed.”

There was something implacable and relentless in the tone and the words.  There was more, too.  There was an intimation, subtly yet most clearly conveyed, that Ralston who spoke had in his day trampled his ambitions and desires beneath his feet in service to the Government, and asked no more now from Linforth than he himself had in his turn performed.  “I, too, have lived in Arcady,” he added.  It twas this last intimation which subdued the protests in Linforth’s mind.  He looked at the worn face of the Commissioner, then he lifted his eyes and swept the horizon with his gaze.  The violet light upon the hills had lost its brightness and its glamour.  In the far distance the hills themselves were withdrawn.  Somewhere in that great barrier to the east was the gap of the Malakand Pass, where the Road now began.  Linforth turned away from the hills towards Peshawur.