s gaze. All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his
young courtier, who fluttered forward sniggering with amusement.

"His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a
Road. His Highness thinks it a damn-fool road. His Highness much regrets
that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara. His Highness wishes his
Excellency good-morning."

Linforth made no answer to the gibe. He passed out into the courtyard,
and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.
Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk
showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky
curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs. Linforth wondered whether
Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection
of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly
home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories quite
dead within his breast?

In one respect Shere Ali was wrong. The Road would go on--now. Linforth
had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he
had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. Old
Andrew Linforth's words came back to his mind:

"Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be
greater than the power of any Government. It will wind through valleys so
deep that the day's sunshine is gone within the hour. It will be carried
in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of
the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow. Yet it will be
finished."

How rightly Andrew Linforth had judged! But Dick for once felt no joy in
the accuracy of the old man's forecast. He walked back through the city
silent and with a heavy heart. He had counted more than he had thought
upon Shere Ali's co-operation. His friendship for Shere Ali had grown
into a greater and a deeper force than he had ever imagined it until this
moment to be. He stopped with a sense of weariness and disillusionment,
and then walked on again. The Road would never again be quite the bright,
inspiring thing which it had been. The dream had a shadow upon it. In the
Eton and Oxford days he had given and given and given so much of himself
to Shere Ali that he could not now lightly and easily lose him altogether
out of his life. Yet he must so lose him, and even then that was not all
the truth. For they would be enemies, Shere Ali would be ruined a