e me, dear, dear Dick!" and
after these words her name, "Violet."

But even so the letter was not ended. A postscript was added:

"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
Remember that! Perhaps some day we will meet. Oh, Dick, good-bye!"

Dick sat with that letter before his eyes for a long while. Violet had
told him that he could be hard, but he was not hard to her. He could read
between the lines, he understood the struggle which she had had with
herself, he recognised the suffering which the letter had caused her. He
was touched to pity, to a greater humanity. He had shown it in his
forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was
brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was
left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all
black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It
required no answer.

"Everything is just wrong," he said to himself, gently, as he thought
over Shere Ali, Violet, himself. "Everything is just not what it might
have been."

And a few days later he started northwards for Turkestan.

CHAPTER XXXVI

"THE LITTLE LESS--"

Three years passed before Linforth returned on leave to England. He
landed at Marseilles towards the end of September, travelled to his home,
and a fortnight later came up from Sussex for a few days to London. It
was the beginning of the autumn season. People were returning to town.
Theatres were re-opening with new plays; and a fellow-officer, who had a
couple of stalls for the first production of a comedy about which public
curiosity was whetted, meeting Linforth in the hall of his club,
suggested that they should go together.

"I shall be glad," said Linforth. "I always go to the play with the
keenest of pleasure. The tuning-up of the orchestra and the rising of the
curtain are events to me. And, to be honest, I have never been to a first
night before. Let us do the thing handsomely and dine together before we
go. It will be my last excitement in London for another three or four
years, I expect."

The two young men dined together accordingly at one of the great
restaurants. Linforth, fresh from the deep valleys of Chiltistan, was
elated by the lights, the neighbourhood of people delicately dressed, and
the subdued throb of music from muted violins.

"I am the little boy at