But even so the letter was not ended.  A postscript was added: 

“I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future, and regret that I couldn’t know them.  That will always be in my mind.  Remember that!  Perhaps some day we will meet.  Oh, Dick, good-bye!”

Dick sat with that letter before his eyes for a long while.  Violet had told him that he could be hard, but he was not hard to her.  He could read between the lines, he understood the struggle which she had had with herself, he recognised the suffering which the letter had caused her.  He was touched to pity, to a greater humanity.  He had shown it in his forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was brought back a prisoner to Kohara.  Linforth, in a word, had shed what was left of his boyhood.  He had come to recognise that life was never all black and all white.  He tore up the letter into tiny fragments.  It required no answer.

“Everything is just wrong,” he said to himself, gently, as he thought over Shere Ali, Violet, himself.  “Everything is just not what it might have been.”

And a few days later he started northwards for Turkestan.

CHAPTER XXXVI

“THE LITTLE LESS—­”

Three years passed before Linforth returned on leave to England.  He landed at Marseilles towards the end of September, travelled to his home, and a fortnight later came up from Sussex for a few days to London.  It was the beginning of the autumn season.  People were returning to town.  Theatres were re-opening with new plays; and a fellow-officer, who had a couple of stalls for the first production of a comedy about which public curiosity was whetted, meeting Linforth in the hall of his club, suggested that they should go together.

“I shall be glad,” said Linforth.  “I always go to the play with the keenest of pleasure.  The tuning-up of the orchestra and the rising of the curtain are events to me.  And, to be honest, I have never been to a first night before.  Let us do the thing handsomely and dine together before we go.  It will be my last excitement in London for another three or four years, I expect.”

The two young men dined together accordingly at one of the great restaurants.  Linforth, fresh from the deep valleys of Chiltistan, was elated by the lights, the neighbourhood of people delicately dressed, and the subdued throb of music from muted violins.

“I am the little boy at the bright shop window,” he said with a laugh, while his eyes wandered round the room.  “I look in through the glass from the pavement outside, and—­”

His voice halted and stopped; and when he resumed he spoke without his former gaiety.  Indeed, the change of note was more perceptible than the brief pause.  His friend conjectured that the words which Linforth now used were not those which he had intended to speak a moment ago.