She never made up and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where eternal adieux were spoken amid tears.  She had no appreciation of the woeful luxury of last interviews.  On the contrary, she hated to confront distress or pain.  It was in her character always to take the easier way when trouble threatened.  She would have avoided altogether this meeting with Shere Ali, had it been possible.

“It’s a pity,” she said, and that was all.  She was reluctant, but she had no misgiving.  Shere Ali was to her still the youth to whom she had said good-bye in Lady Marfield’s conservatory.  She had seen him in the flush of victory after a close-fought game, and thus she had seen him often enough before.  It was not to be wondered at that she noted no difference at that moment.

But the difference was there for the few who had eyes to see.  He had journeyed up the broken road into Chiltistan.  At the Fort of Chakdara, in the rice fields on the banks of the Swat river, he had taken his luncheon one day with the English commandant and the English doctor, and there he had parted with the ways of life which had become to him the only ways.  He had travelled thence for a few hundred yards along a straight strip of road running over level ground, and so with the levies of Dir to escort him he swung round to the left.  A screen of hillside and grey rock moved across the face of the country behind him.  The last outpost was left behind.  The Fort and the Signal Tower on the pinnacle opposite and the English flag flying over all were hidden from his sight.  Wretched as any exile from his native land, Shere All went up into the lower passes of the Himalayas.  Days were to pass and still the high snow-peaks which glittered in the sky, gold in the noonday, silver in the night time, above the valleys of Chiltistan were to be hidden in the far North.  But already the words began to be spoken and the little incidents to occur which were to ripen him for his destiny.  They were garnered into his memories as separate and unrelated events.  It was not until afterwards that he came to know how deeply they had left their marks, or that he set them in an ordered sequence and gave to them a particular significance.  Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.

Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the Fort.  Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men’s barracks, the stone landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors.  He looked down into the enclosure as into a well.  It might almost have been a section of the barracks at Chatham.  But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the steep slope and the Signal Tower.

“I was here,” said the Doctor, who stood behind him, “during the Malakand campaign.  You remember it, no doubt?”

“I was at Oxford.  I remember it well,” said Shere Ali.