Gradually, however, his own character was overlaid; he was quick to learn, and in games quick to excel.  He made friends amongst his schoolmates, he carried with him to Oxford the charm of manner which is Eton’s particular gift, and from Oxford he passed to London.  He was rich, he was liked, and he found a ready welcome, which did not spoil him.  Luffe would undoubtedly have classed him amongst the best of the native Princes who go to England for their training, and on that very account, would have feared the more for his future.  Shere Ali was now just twenty-four, he was tall, spare of body and wonderfully supple of limbs, and but for a fulness of the lower lip, which was characteristic of his family, would have been reckoned more than usually handsome.

He came out of the door of the hut and stood by the side of Linforth.  They looked up towards the Meije, but little of that majestic mass of rock was visible.  The clouds hung low; the glacier below them upon their left had a dull and unillumined look, and over the top of the Breche de la Meije, the pass to the left of their mountain, the snow whirled up from the further side like smoke.  The hut is built upon a great spur of the mountain which runs down into the desolate valley des Etancons, and at its upper end melts into the great precipitous rock-wall which forms one of the main difficulties of the ascent.  Against this wall the clouds were massed.  Snow lay where yesterday the rocks had shone grey and ruddy brown in the sunlight, and against the great wall here and there icicles were hung.

“It looks unpromising,” said Linforth.  “But Peter says that the mountain is in good condition.  To-morrow it may be possible.  It is worth while waiting.  We shall get down to La Grave to-morrow instead of to-day.  That is all.”

“Yes.  It will make no difference to our plans,” said Shere Ali; and so far as their immediate plans were concerned Shere Ali was right.  But these two men had other and wider plans which embraced not a summer’s holiday but a lifetime, plans which they jealously kept secret; and these plans, as it happened, the delay of a day in the hut upon the Meije was deeply to affect.

They turned back into the room and breakfasted.  Then Linforth lit his pipe and once more curled himself up in his rug upon the straw.  Shere Ali followed his example.  And it was of the wider plans that they at once began to talk.

“But heaven only knows when I shall get out to India,” cried Linforth after a while.  “There am I at Chatham and not a chance, so far as I can see, of getting away.  You will go back first.”

It was significant that Linforth, who had never been in India, none the less spoke habitually of going back to it, as though that country in truth was his native soil.  Shere Ali shook his head.