on Sunday evenings, he was filled with great longings—­and with a conviction of the eternal Truth and Beauty of Christianity and the essential nobility of its gentle, unselfish, lofty teachings.  He would think of his mother, of some splendid men and women he had known, especially missionaries, medical and other, at Bannu and Poona and elsewhere, and feel that he was really a Christian at heart; and then again in Khost and Mekran Kot, when carrying his life in his hand, across the border, in equal danger from the bullet of the Border Police, Guides, or Frontier Force cavalry-outposts and from the bullet of criminal tribesmen, when a devil in his soul surged up screaming for blood and fire and slaughter; during the long stealthy crawl as he stalked the stalker; during the wild, yelling, knife-brandishing rush; as he pressed the steady trigger or guided the slashing, stabbing Khyber knife, or as he instinctively hallaled the victim of his shikar, he knew he was a Pathan and a Mussulman as were his fathers.

But whether circumstances brought his English blood to the surface or his Pathan blood, whether the day were one of his most English days or one of his most Pathan days, whether it were a day of mingled and quickly alternating Englishry and Pathanity he now loved and supported Britain and the British Empire for Mrs. Dearman’s sake.  Often as he (like most other non-officials) had occasion to detest and desire to kick the Imperial Englishman, championship of England and her Empire was now his creed.  And as there was probably not another England-lover in all India who had his knowledge of under-currents, and forces within and without, he was perhaps the most anxiously loving of all her lovers, and the most appalled at the criminal carelessness, blind ignorance, fatuous conceit, and folly of a proportion of her sons in India.

Knowing what he knew of Teutonic intrigue and influence in India, Ceylon, Afghanistan, Aden, Persia, Egypt, East Africa, the Straits Settlements, and China, he was reminded of the men and women of Pompeii who ate, drank, and were merry, danced and sang, pursued pleasure and the nimble denarius, while Vesuvius rumbled.

Constantly the comparison entered his mind.

He had sojourned with Indian “students” in India, England, Germany, Geneva, America and Japan, and had belonged to the most secret of societies.  He had himself been a well-paid agent of Germany in both Asia and Africa; and he had been instrumental in supplying thousands of rifles to Border raiders, Persian bandits, and other potential troublers of the pax Britannica.  He now lived half his double life in Indian dress and moved on many planes; and to many places where even he could not penetrate unsuspected, his staunch and devoted slave, Moussa Isa, went observant.  And all that he learnt and knew, within and without the confines of Ind, by itself disturbed him, as an England-lover, not at all.  Taken in conjunction with the probabilities of a great European War it disturbed him mightily.  As mightily as unselfishly.  To him the dripping weapon, the blazing roof, the shrieking woman, the mangled corpse were but incidents, the unavoidable, unobjectionable concomitants of the Great Game, the game he most loved (and played upon every possible occasion)—­War.