Dick folded the letter reverently, and crossing to his mother’s side, put his arm about her waist.

“Yes,” he said.  “My father knew it as I know it.  He used the words which I in my turn have used.  We Linforths belong to the Road.”

His mother took the letter from his hand and locked it away.

“Yes,” she said bravely, and called a smile to her face.  “So you must go.”

Dick nodded his head.

“Yes.  You see, the Road has not advanced since my father died.  It almost seems, mother, that it waits for me.”

He stayed that day and that night with Sybil, and in the morning both brought haggard faces to the breakfast table.  Sybil, indeed, had slept, but, with her memories crowding hard upon her, she had dreamed again one of those almost forgotten dreams which, in the time of her suspense, had so tortured her.  The old vague terror had seized upon her again.  She dreamed once more of a young Englishman who pursued a young Indian along the wooden galleries of the road above the torrents into the far mists.  She could tell as of old the very dress of the native who fled.  A thick sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her a glimpse of gay silk; soft high leather boots protected his feet; and upon his face there was a look of fury and wild fear.  But this night there was a difference in the dream.  Her present distress added a detail.  The young Englishman who pursued turned his face to her as he disappeared amongst the mists, and she saw that it was the face of Dick.

But of this she said nothing at all at the breakfast table, nor when she bade Dick good-bye at the stile on the further side of the field beyond the garden.

“You will come down again, and I shall go to Marseilles to see you off,” she said, and so let him go.

There was something, too, stirring in Dick’s mind of which he said no word.  In the letter of his father, certain sentences had caught his eye, and on his way up to London they recurred to his thoughts, as, indeed, they had more than once during the evening before.

“May he meet,” Harry Linforth had written to Sybil of his son Dick—­“may he meet a woman like you, my dear, when his time comes, and love her as I love you.”

Dick Linforth fell to thinking of Violet Oliver.  She was in India at this moment.  She might still be there when he landed.  Would he meet her, he wondered, somewhere on the way to Chiltistan?

CHAPTER XIX

A GIFT MISUNDERSTOOD

The month was over before Linforth at last steamed out of the harbour at Marseilles.  He was as impatient to reach Bombay as a year before Shere Ali had been reluctant.  To Shere Ali the boat had flown with wings of swiftness, to Linforth she was a laggard.  The steamer passed Stromboli on a wild night of storm and moonlight.  The wrack of clouds scurrying overhead, now obscured, now let the moonlight through,