She turned to him a haggard face.  Dewes sought to reassure her.

“But there is peace now in Chiltistan.  We keep a close watch on that country, I can tell you.  I don’t think we shall be caught napping there again.”

But these arguments had little weight with Sybil Linforth.  The tragedy of fourteen years ago had beaten her down with too strong a hand.  She could not reason about the road.  She only felt, and she felt with all the passion of her nature.

“What will you do, then?” asked Dewes.

She walked a little further on before she answered.

“I shall do nothing.  If, when the time comes, Dick feels that work upon that road is his heritage, if he wants to follow in his father’s steps, I shall say not a single word to dissuade him.”

Dewes stared at her.  This half-hour of conversation had made real to him at all events the great strength of her hostility.  Yet she would put the hostility aside and say not a word.

“That’s more than I could do,” he said, “if I felt as you do.  By George it is!”

Sybil smiled at him with friendliness.

“It’s not bravery.  Do you remember the unfinished letter which you brought home to me from Harry?  There were three sentences in that which I cannot pretend to have forgotten,” and she repeated the sentences: 

“’Whether he will come out here, it is too early to think about.  But the road will not be finished—­and I wonder.  If he wants to, let him.’  It is quite clear—­isn’t it?—­that Harry wanted him to take up the work.  You can read that in the words.  I can imagine him speaking them and hear the tone he would use.  Besides—­I have still a greater fear than the one of which you know.  I don’t want Dick, when he grows up, ever to think that I have been cowardly, and, because I was cowardly, disloyal to his father.”

“Yes, I see,” said Colonel Dewes.

And this time he really did understand.

“We will go in and lunch,” said Sybil, and they walked back to the house.

CHAPTER VI

A LONG WALK

The footsteps sounded overhead with a singular regularity.  From the fireplace to the door, and back again from the door to the fireplace.  At each turn there was a short pause, and each pause was of the same duration.  The footsteps were very light; it was almost as though an animal, a caged animal, padded from the bars at one end to the bars at the other.  There was something stealthy in the footsteps too.

In the room below a man of forty-five sat writing at a desk—­a very tall, broad-shouldered man, in clerical dress.  Twenty-five years before he had rowed as number seven in the Oxford Eight, with an eye all the while upon a mastership at his old school.  He had taken a first in Greats; he had obtained his mastership; for the last two years he had had a House.  As he had been at the beginning, so he was now, a man without theories but with an instinctive comprehension of boys.  In consequence there were no vacancies in his house, and the Headmaster had grown accustomed to recommend the Rev. Mr. Arthur Pollard when boys who needed any special care came to the school.