“My officers used to preach to me, but I have broken them of it--all but the doctor. Poor Tarleton! he is a very faithful fellow. But will you think me quite mad, Miss Ross, if I tell you that there is another sound as well? It is as if the warder of a fortress should listen across a valley, and hear the tread of the sentry on the ramparts of a hostile fortress opposite. And the tread comes nearer.” “Major Keeling, you frighten me. Who--what do you mean?” He laughed. “Oh, the tread is a good thousand miles away yet. But it is coming nearer, all the same. Nominally it is stopped by the Araxes, but it is already pressing on to the Jaxartes. The Khanates will be absorbed, and then--will the two warders meet face to face then, I wonder? It may not be in my day, or even yours, but it will come.” “You mean Scythia? But is she advancing? Why----?” “Is it for me to say? She explains it as the trend of her manifest destiny; we say it is her hunger for territory. But she advances, and we remain stationary, or worse, advance and retreat again. But retreat from this point we will not while the breath of life is in me,” he cried passionately; “and when I die, I mean to be buried here, if there is any burial for me at all, that at least the bones of an Englishman may hold the frontier for England.” “But,” hesitated Penelope, “if we don’t want to advance, why shouldn’t she?--up to our frontier, I mean, not beyond.” “Because she wouldn’t stop there. How could she, after sweeping over all the barren worthless regions, pause when a rich fertile country lay before her? I couldn’t myself. Otherwise, one would say that at any rate her rule could not be worse than the present state of things. There are plague-spots in Central Asia, like Gamara, which ought to be swept from the face of the earth. But we ought to do it, not they. It’s our men who have been done to death there--not spies, but regularly accredited representatives of the Government--and we don’t stir a finger to avenge them. Whybrow takes his life in his hand when he enters Central Asia, and so will any man who follows him.” “But why don’t we do anything?” asked Penelope, wondering at his impassioned tone, and little dreaming of the sinister influence which the wicked city of Gamara was to exercise over her own life. “Because we are too lazy, too meek, too much afraid of responsibility--anything! Old Harry--I beg your pardon--Sir Henry Lennox would do it. I heard him say so once to the troops at a review--that he would like nothing better than to conquer Central Asia at their head, plundering all the way to Gamara. He got pulled up for it, of course. He isn’t exempt from official recognition of that kind any more than meaner people, though I really think I am particularly unfortunate. Just now I am in trouble with Church as well as State. I was so ill-advised as to write to a bishop about sending missionaries here.”