“It looked like a bound volume of magazines.”

Sybil nodded her head.

“It was a volume of the ‘Fortnightly.’  He was reading an article written forty years ago by Andrew Linforth—­” and she suddenly cried out, “Oh, how I wish he had never lived.  He was an uncle of Harry’s—­my husband.  He predicted it.  He was in the old Company, then he became a servant of the Government, and he was the first to begin the road.  You know his history?”

“No.”

“It is a curious one.  When it was his time to retire, he sent his money to England, he made all his arrangements to come home, and then one night he walked out of the hotel in Bombay, a couple of days before the ship sailed, and disappeared.  He has never been heard of since.”

“Had he no wife?” asked Dewes.

“No,” replied Sybil.  “Do you know what I think?  I think he went back to the north, back to his Road.  I think it called him.  I think he could not keep away.”

“But we should have come across him,” cried Dewes, “or across news of him.  Surely we should!”

Sybil shrugged her shoulders.

“In that article which Dick was reading, the road was first proposed.  Listen to this,” and she began to recite: 

“The road will reach northwards, through Chiltistan, to the foot of the Baroghil Pass, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.  Not yet, but it will.  Many men will die in the building of it from cold and dysentery, and even hunger—­Englishmen and coolies from Baltistan.  Many men will die fighting over it, Englishmen and Chiltis, and Gurkhas and Sikhs.  It will cost millions of money, and from policy or economy successive Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be greater than the power of any Government.  It will wind through valleys so deep that the day’s sunshine is gone within the hour.  It will be carried in galleries along the faces of mountains, and for eight months of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow.  Yet it will be finished.  It will go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush, and then only the British rule in India will be safe.”

She finished the quotation.

“That is what Andrew Linforth prophesied.  Much of it has already been justified.  I have no doubt the rest will be in time.  I think he went north when he disappeared.  I think the Road called him, as it is now calling Dick.”

She made the admission at last quite simply and quietly.  Yet it was evident to Dewes that it cost her much to make it.

“Yes,” he said.  “That is what you fear.”

She nodded her head and let him understand something of the terror with which the Road inspired her.

“When the trouble began fourteen years ago, when the road was cut and day after day no news came of whether Harry lived or, if he died, how he died—­I dreamed of it—­I used to see horrible things happening on that road—­night after night I saw them.  Dreadful things happening to Dick and his father while I stood by and could do nothing.  Oh, it seems to me a living thing greedy for blood—­our blood.”