Violet asked him anxiously for the proof.

“I can tell to a day when the words were repeated in Kohara.  For a fortnight after my coming the Mullahs still had hopes.  They had heard nothing, and they met me always with salutations and greetings.  Then came the day when I rode up the valley and a Mullah who had smiled the day before passed me as though he had not noticed me at all.  The news had come.  I was sure of it at the time.  I reined in my horse and called sharply to one of the servants riding behind me, ‘Who is that?’ The Mullah heard the question, and he turned and up went the palm of his hand to his forehead in a flash.  But I was not inclined to let him off so easily.”

“What did you do?” Violet asked uneasily.

“I said to him, ’My friend, I will take care that you know me the next time we meet upon the road.  Show me your hands!’ He held them out, and they were soft as a woman’s.  I was close to a bridge which some workmen were repairing.  So I had my friend brought along to the bridge.  Then I said to one of the workmen, ’Would you like to earn your day’s wage and yet do no work?’ He laughed, thinking that I was joking.  But I was not.  I said to him, ’Very well, then, see that this soft-handed creature does your day’s work.  You will bring him to me at the Palace this evening, and if I find that he has not done the work, or that you have helped him, you will forfeit your wages and I will whip you both into the bargain.’  The Mullah was brought to me in the evening,” said Shere Ali, smiling grimly.  “He was so stiff he could hardly walk.  I made him show me his hands again, and this time they were blistered.  So I told him to remember his manners in the future, and I let him go.  But he was a man of prominence in the country, and when the story got known he became rather ridiculous.”  He turned with a smile to Violet Oliver.

“My people don’t like being made ridiculous—­least of all Mullahs.”

But there was no answering smile on Violet’s face.  Rather she was troubled and alarmed.

“But surely that was unwise?”

Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter?” he said.  He did not tell her all of that story.  There was an episode which had occurred two days later when Shere Ali was stalking an ibex on the hillside.  A bullet had whistled close by his ear, and it had been fired from behind him.  He was never quite sure whether his father or the Mullah was responsible for that bullet, but he inclined to attribute it to the Mullah.

“Yes, I have the priests against me,” he said.  “They call me the Englishman.”  Then he laughed.  “A curious piece of irony, isn’t it?”

He stood up suddenly and said:  “When I left England I was in doubt.  I could not be sure whether my home, my true home, was there or in Chiltistan.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Violet.

“I am no longer in doubt.  It is neither in England nor in Chiltistan.  I am a citizen of no country.  I have no place anywhere at all.”