'Hurree thinks well of the boy, doesn't he?'

'Oh, very indeed--we have had some pleasant evenings at my little
place--but I think it would be waste to throw him away with Hurree on
the Ethnological side.'

'Not for a first experience. How does that strike you, Mahbub? Let
the boy run with the lama for six months. After that we can see. He
will get experience.'

'He has it already, Sahib--as a fish controls the water he swims in.
But for every reason it will be well to loose him from the school.'

'Very good, then,' said Creighton, half to himself. 'He can go with
the lama, and if Hurree Babu cares to keep an eye on them so much the
better. He won't lead the boy into any danger as Mahbub would.
Curious--his wish to be an F R S. Very human, too. He is best on the
Ethnological side--Hurree.'

No money and no preferment would have drawn Creighton from his work on
the Indian Survey, but deep in his heart also lay the ambition to write
'F R S' after his name. Honours of a sort he knew could be obtained by
ingenuity and the help of friends, but, to the best of his belief,
nothing save work--papers representing a life of it--took a man into
the Society which he had bombarded for years with monographs on strange
Asiatic cults and unknown customs. Nine men out of ten would flee from
a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom; but Creighton was the
tenth, and at times his soul yearned for the crowded rooms in easy
London where silver-haired, bald-headed gentlemen who know nothing of
the Army move among spectroscopic experiments, the lesser plants of the
frozen tundras, electric flight-measuring machines, and apparatus for
slicing into fractional millimetres the left eye of the female
mosquito. By all right and reason, it was the Royal Geographical that
should have appealed to him, but men are as chancy as children in their
choice of playthings. So Creighton smiled, and thought the better of
Hurree Babu, moved by like desire.

He dropped the ghost-dagger and looked up at Mahbub.

'How soon can we get the colt from the stable?' said the horse-dealer,
reading his eyes.

'Hmm! If I withdraw him by order now--what will he do, think you? I
have never before assisted at the teaching of such an one.'

'He will come to me,' said Mahbub promptly. 'Lurgan Sahib and I will
prepare him for the Road.'

'So be it, then. For six months he shall run at his choice. But who
will be his sponsor?'

Lurgan slight