Produced by Al Haines. *ROSE OF THE WORLD* BY AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE AUTHORS OF "THE SECRET ORCHARD" AND "THE STAR DREAMER" _O Dream of my Life, my Glory,_ _O Rose of the World, my Dream_ (THE DOMINION OF DREAMS) LONDON SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE 1905 (_All rights reserved_) PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. *BOOK I* *ROSE OF THE WORLD* *CHAPTER I* It is our fate as a nation, head and heart of a world empire, that much of our manhood must pursue its career far away from home. And it is our strength that these English sons of ours have taught themselves to make it home wherever they find their work. The fervid land of India had become home to Raymond Bethune for so many years that it would have been difficult for him to picture his life elsewhere. The glamour of the East, of the East that is England’s, had entered into his blood, without, however, altering its cool northern deliberate course; that it can be thus with our children, therein also lies the strength of England. Raymond Bethune, Major of Guides, loved the fierce lads to whom he was at once father and despot, as perhaps he could have loved no troop of honest thick-skulled English soldiers. He was content with the comradeship of his brother officers, men who thought like himself and fought like himself; content to spend the best years of existence hanging between heaven and earth on the arid flanks of a Kashmir mountain range, in forts the walls of which had been cemented by centuries of blood; looked forward, without blenching, to the probability of laying down his life in some obscure frontier skirmish, unmourned and unnoticed. His duty sufficed him. He found happiness in it that it was his duty. Such men as he are the very stones of our Empire’s foundation. * * * * * Yet though he was thus intimately satisfied with his life and his life’s task, Bethune was conscious of a strange emotion, almost a contraction of the heart, as he followed the kitmutgar to Lady Gerardine’s drawing-room in the palace of the Lieutenant-Governor, this October day.