“Shere Ali?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Violet.

Linforth hesitated, looking at his companion.  How much should he tell her, he asked himself?  The whole truth?  If he did, would it trouble her?  He wondered.  He had no wish to hurt her.  He began warily: 

“After the campaign was over in Chiltistan I was sent after him.”

“Yes.  I heard that before I left India,” she replied.

“I hunted him,” and it seemed to Linforth that she flinched.  “There’s no other word, I am afraid.  I hunted him—­for months, from the borders of Tibet to the borders of Russia.  In the end I caught him.”

“I heard that, too,” she said.

“I came up with him one morning, in a desert of stones.  He was with three of his followers.  The only three who had been loyal to him.  They had camped as best they could under the shelter of a boulder.  It was very cold.  They had no coverings and little food.  The place was as desolate as you could imagine—­a wilderness of boulders and stones stretching away to the round of the sky, level as the palm of your hand, with a ragged tree growing up here and there.  If we had not come up with them that day I think they would have died.”

He spoke with his eyes upon Violet, ready to modify his words at the first evidence of pain.  She gave that evidence as he ended.  She drew her cloak closer about her and shivered.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“To me?  Nothing.  We spoke only formally.  All the way back to India we behaved as strangers.  It was easier for both of us.  I brought him down through Chiltistan and Kohara into India.  I brought him down—­along the Road which at Eton we had planned to carry on together.  Down that road we came together—­I the captor, he the prisoner.”

Again Violet flinched.

“And where is he now?” she asked in a low voice.

Suddenly Linforth turned round and looked down the steps, across the hall to the glass walls of the restaurant.

“Did he ever come here with you?” he asked.  “Did he ever dine with you there amongst the lights and the merry-makers and the music?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Linforth laughed, and again there was a note of bitterness in the laughter.

“How long ago it seems!  Shere Ali will dine here no more.  He is in Burma.  He was deported to Burma.”

He told her no more than that.  There was no need that she should know that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their honesty.  The contrast between Shere Ali’s fate and the hopes with which he had set out was shocking enough.  Yet even in his case so very little had turned the scale.  Between the fulfilment of his hopes and the great failure what was there?  If he had been sent to Ajmere instead of to England, if he and Linforth had not crossed the Meije to La Grave in Dauphine, if a necklace of pearls he had offered had not been accepted—­very likely at this very moment he might be reigning in Chiltistan, trusted and supported by the Indian Government, a helpful friend gratefully recognised.  To Linforth’s thinking it was only “just not” with Shere Ali, too.