Shere Ali would have avoided that man if he could.  He hesitated, unwilling to recognise and unable quite to ignore.  And while he hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand.

“We know each other, surely.  I used to see you at Eton, didn’t I?  I used to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, Dick Linforth.  I am Colonel Dewes.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Shere Ali with some embarrassment; and he took the Colonel’s outstretched hand.  “I thought that you had left India for good.”

“So did I,” said Dewes.  “But I was wrong.”  He turned and walked along by the side of Shere Ali.  “I don’t know why exactly, but I did not find life in London so very interesting.”

Shere Ali looked quickly at the Colonel.

“Yet you had looked forward to retiring and going home?” he asked with a keen interest.  Colonel Dewes gave himself up to reflection.  He sounded the obscurities of his mind.  It was a practice to which he was not accustomed.  He drew himself erect, his eyes became fixed, and with a puckered forehead he thought.

“I suppose so,” he said.  “Yes, certainly.  I remember.  One used to buck at mess of the good time one would have, the comfort of one’s club and one’s rooms, and the rest of it.  It isn’t comfortable in India, is it?  Not compared with England.  Your furniture, your house, and all that sort of thing.  You live as if you were a lodger, don’t you know, and it didn’t matter for a little while whether you were comfortable or not.  The little while slips on and on, and suddenly you find you have been in the country twenty or thirty years, and you have never taken the trouble to be comfortable.  It’s like living in a dak-bungalow.”

The Colonel halted and pulled at his moustache.  He had made a discovery.  He had reflected not without result.  “By George!” he said, “that’s right.  Let me put it properly now, as a fellow would put it in a book, if he hit upon anything as good.”  He framed his aphorism in different phrases before he was satisfied with it.  Then he delivered himself of it with pride.

“At the bottom of the Englishman’s conception of life in India, there is always the idea of a dak-bungalow,” and he repeated the sentence to commit it surely to memory.  “But don’t you use it,” he said, turning to Shere Ali suddenly.  “I thought of that—­not you.  It’s mine.”

“I won’t use it,” said Shere Ali.

“Life in India is based upon the dak-bungalow,” said Dewes.  “Yes, yes”; and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali.  “You may use it if you like,” he conceded.  “Only you would naturally add that it was I who thought of it.”

Shere Ali smiled and replied: 

“I won’t fail to do that, Colonel Dewes.”

“No?  Then use it as much as you like, for it’s true.  Out here one remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it.  But back there, one forgets the discomfort of India.  By George! that’s pretty good, too.  Shall we look at the horses?”