Shere Ali did not answer that question.  With a quiet persistence he kept Colonel Dewes to the conversation.  Colonel Dewes for his part was not reluctant to continue it, in spite of the mental wear and tear which it involved.  He felt that he was clearly in the vein.  There was no knowing what brilliant thing he might not say next.  He wished that some of those clever fellows on the India Council were listening to him.

“Why?” asked Shere Ali.  “Why back there does one forget the discomfort of India?”

He asked the question less in search of information than to discover whether the feelings of which he was conscious were shared too by his companion.

“Why?” answered Dewes wrinkling his forehead again.  “Because one misses more than one thought to miss and one doesn’t find half what one thought to find.  Come along here!”

He led Shere Ali up to the top of the stand.

“We can see the race quite well from here,” he said, “although that is not the reason why I brought you up.  This is what I wanted to show you.”

He waved his hand over towards the great space which the racecourse enclosed.  It was thronged with natives robed in saffron and pink, in blue and white, in scarlet and delicate shades of mauve and violet.  The whole enclosure was ablaze with colour, and the colours perpetually moved and grouped themselves afresh as the throng shifted.  A great noise of cries rose up into the clear air.

“I suppose that is what I missed,” said Dewes, “not the noise, not the mere crowd—­you can get both on an English racecourse—­but the colour.”

And suddenly before Shere Ali’s eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock at Newmarket during a July meeting.  The sleek horses paced within the cool grove of trees; the bright sunlight, piercing the screen of leaves overhead, dappled their backs with flecks of gold.  Nothing of the sunburnt grass before his eyes was visible to him.  He saw the green turf of the Jockey Club enclosure, the seats, the luncheon room behind with its open doors and windows.

“Yes, I understand,” he said.  “But you have come back,” and a note of envy sounded in his voice.  Here was one point in which the parallel between his case and that of Colonel Dewes was not complete.  Dewes had missed India as he had missed England.  But Dewes was a free man.  He could go whither he would.  “Yes, you were able to come back.  How long do you stay?”

And the answer to that question startled Shere Ali.

“I have come back for good.”

“You are going to live here?” cried Shere Ali.

“Not here, exactly.  In Cashmere.  I go up to Cashmere in a week’s time.  I shall live there and die there.”

Colonel Dewes spoke without any note of anticipation, and without any regret.  It was difficult for Shere Ali to understand how deeply he felt.  Yet the feeling must be deep.  He had cut himself off from his own people, from his own country.  Shere Ali was stirred to yet more questions.  He was anxious to understand thoroughly all that had moved this commonplace matter-of-fact man at his side.