Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/144

 rolled out into the Indian desert, between white, rush-tipped hillocks, with the fantastic, red granite mountains of Rajputana stabbing the far horizon with twisted peaks.

A strange land, a motley land, which Hector had not seen since he was a child. A land of too much color, gold and heliotrope and lake and purple, picked out with glaring white high lights, nicked with sulphur yellow and glaucous green, and edged with chocolate brown and luminous blues.

But Hector Wade had no eyes for the landscape. For—was it impulse? Was it instinct—or imagination?

He did not know. Did not even try to analyze.

He only knew that a great, portentous voice was calling to him across the distance, from the North beyond the snow-bound Afghan mountain passes, and it called with the language of the past—and the future … with the steely, swishing sob of crossing blades.

A puissant and compelling force surged through him. It came from the outside, springing, nevertheless, from something of which he was a living, throbbing part, suffusing him with deep, triumphant joy … and it was, suddenly, with an almost physical shock, that he realized how with every mile the West, England, his old life, his old interests, his old customs and reactions and prejudices, were slipping away from him … they—and Jane Warburton! The girl who was dearer to him than the dwelling of kings!

He loved her—and now he had lost her, for ever, and his heart was like a house without any light, where