Dewes caught at the question as an opportunity for reassuring the Political Officer.

“Why, sir, the Khan told us.  Have you forgotten?  He is to go to Eton and Oxford.  He’ll see something of England.  He will learn—­” and Major Dewes stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political Officer’s face.

“I think you are all mad,” said Luffe, and he suddenly started up in his bed and cried with vehemence, “You take these boys to England.  You train them in the ways of the West, the ideas of the West, and then you send them back again to the East, to rule over Eastern people, according to Eastern ideas, and you think all is well.  I tell you, Dewes, it’s sheer lunacy.  Of course it’s true—­this boy won’t perhaps suffer in esteem among his people quite as much as others have done.  He belongs and his people belong to the Maulai sect.  The laws of religion are not strict among them.  They drink wine, they eat what they will, they do not lose caste so easily.  But you have to look at the man as he will be, the hybrid mixture of East and West.”

He sank back among his pillows, exhausted by the violence of his outcry, and for a little while he was silent.  Then he began again, but this time in a low, pleading voice, which was very unusual in him, and which kept the words he spoke vivid and fresh in Dewes’ memory for many years to come.  Indeed, Dewes would not have believed that Luffe could have spoken on any subject with so much wistfulness.

“Listen to me, Dewes.  I have lived for the Frontier.  I have had no other interest, almost no other ties.  I am not a man of friends.  I believed at one time Linforth was my friend.  I believed I liked him very much.  But I think now that it was only because he was bound up with the Frontier.  The Frontier has been my wife, my children, my home, my one long and lasting passion.  And I am very well content that it has been so.  I don’t regret missed opportunities of happiness.  What I regret is that I shall not be alive in twenty-one years to avert the danger I foresee, or to laugh at my fears if I am wrong.  They can do what they like in Rajputana and Bengal and Bombay.  But on the Frontier I want things to go well.  Oh, how I want them to go well!”

Luffe had grown very pale, and the sweat glistened upon his forehead.  Dewes held to his lips a glass of brandy which stood upon a table beside the bed.

“What danger do you foresee?” asked Dewes.  “I will remember what you say.”

“Yes, remember it; write it out, so that you may remember it, and din it into their ears at Government House,” said Luffe.  “You take these boys, you give them Oxford, a season in London—­did you ever have a season in London when you were twenty-one, Dewes?  You show them Paris.  You give them opportunities of enjoyment, such as no other age, no other place affords—­has ever afforded.  You give them, for a short while, a life of colour, of swift crowding hours of pleasure, and then you send