“I wonder who she is,” he said thoughtfully.

“I know,” replied Luffe, almost carelessly.  He was immersed in the second letter which the Diwan had handed to him.

“Who is it?” asked Dewes.

“Linforth’s wife.”

“His wife!” exclaimed Dewes, and, looking at the photograph again, he said in a low voice which was gentle with compassion, “Poor woman!”

“Yes, yes.  Poor woman!” said Luffe, and he went on reading his letter.

It was characteristic of Luffe that he should feel so little concern in the domestic side of Linforth’s life.  He was not very human in his outlook on the world.  Questions of high policy interested and engrossed his mind; he lived for the Frontier, not so much subduing a man’s natural emotions as unaware of them.  Men figured in his thoughts as the instruments of policy; their womenfolk as so many hindrances or aids to the fulfilment of their allotted tasks.  Thus Linforth’s death troubled him greatly, since Linforth was greatly concerned in one great undertaking.  Moreover, the scheme had been very close to Linforth’s heart, even as it was to Luffe’s.  But Linforth’s wife was in England, and thus, as it seemed to him, neither aid nor impediment.  But in that he was wrong.  She had been the mainspring of Linforth’s energy, and so much was evident in the letter which Luffe read slowly to the end.

“Yes, Linforth’s dead,” said he, with a momentary discouragement.  “There are many whom we could more easily have spared.  Of course the thing will go on.  That’s certain,” he said, nodding his head.  A cold satisfaction shone in his eyes.  “But Linforth was part of the Thing.”

He passed the second letter to Dewes, who read it; and for a while both men remained thoughtful and, as it seemed, unaware for the moment of the Diwan’s presence.  There was this difference, however.  Luffe was thinking of “the Thing”; Dewes was pondering on the grim little tragedy which these letters revealed, and thanking Heaven in all simplicity of heart that there was no woman waiting in fear because of him and trembling at sight of each telegraph boy she met upon the road.

The grim little tragedy was not altogether uncommon upon the Indian frontier, but it gained vividness from the brevity of the letters which related it.  The first one, that in the woman’s hand, written from a house under the Downs of Sussex, told of the birth of a boy in words at once sacred and simple.  They were written for the eyes of one man, and Major Dewes had a feeling that his own, however respectfully, violated their sanctity.  The second letter was an unfinished one written by the husband to the wife from his tent amongst the rabble of Abdulla Mahommed.  Linforth clearly understood that this was the last letter he would write.  “I am sitting writing this by the light of a candle.  The tent door is open.  In front of me I can see the great snow-mountains.  All the ugliness of the lower shale slopes is hidden.  By such a moonlight, my dear, may you always look back upon my memory.  For it is over, Sybil.  They are waiting until I fall asleep.  I have been warned of it.  But I shall fall asleep to-night.  I have kept awake for two nights.  I am very tired.”