"Then perhaps you read the debate last night?" She looked at him with a
kindling eye.

"Of course I did--every word of it! Do you know what those Radical
fellows are up to now? They'll never rest until we've lost the
Khaibar--and then the Lord only knows what'll happen."

Diana flew into discussion--quick breath, red cheeks! Mrs. Colwood
looked on amazed.

Presently both appealed to her, the Anglo-Indian. But she smiled and
stammered--declining the challenge. Beside their eagerness, their
passion, she felt herself tongue-tied. Captain Roughsedge had seen two
years' service on the Northwest Frontier; Diana had ridden through the
Khaibar with her father and a Lieutenant-Governor. In both the sense of
England's historic task as the guardian of a teeming India against
onslaught from the north, had sunk deep, not into brain merely. Figures
of living men, acts of heroism and endurance, the thought of English
soldiers ambushed in mountain defiles, or holding out against Afridi
hordes in lonely forts, dying and battling, not for themselves, but that
the great mountain barrier might hold against the savagery of the north,
and English honor and English power maintain themselves unscathed--these
had mingled, in both, with the chivalry and the red blood of youth. The
eyes of both had seen; the hearts of both had felt.

And now, in the English House of Commons, there were men who doubted and
sneered about these things--who held an Afridi life dearer than an
English one--who cared nothing for the historic task, who would let
India go to-morrow without a pang!

Misguided recreants! But Mrs. Colwood, looking on, could only feel that
had they never played their impish part, the winter afternoon for these
two companions of hers would have been infinitely less agreeable.

For certainly denunication and argument became Diana--all the more that
she was no "female franzy" who must have all the best of the talk; she
listened--she evoked--she drew on, and drew out. Mrs. Colwood was
secretly sure that this very modest and ordinarily stupid young man had
never talked so well before, that his mother would have been astonished
could she have beheld him. What had come to the young women of this
generation! Their grandmothers cared for politics only so far as they
advanced the fortunes of their lords--otherwise what was Hecuba to them,
or they to Hecuba? But these women have minds for the impersonal. Diana
was not talking to make an effect on