"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington quietly. "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát, is absolutely done for unless we dig him out." His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then Walcot blurted out: "Is this a council of war?" "No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it." Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his shoulders. "It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled. Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably attentive, throughout the discussion. "We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain nodded. Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him. He handed the paper to Walcot. "Will you sign it?" he said. The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such treatment: "You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said, taking up the pen. VII Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying man. Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely. He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing in his last moments but the safety of the force. "You'll have to watch those Bakót chaps," he murmured, "there's no fight in 'em." And again with more difficulty. "Those beggars 'll cut you off at the Sorágh Gul; get round by the Bewal road. You'll have to smash 'em there." His mind was evidently away with the retreating troops. His grip tightened on Terrington's hand. "If only I could go along with you, old man. Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first hurdle." He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last beats of his heart. Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room. The sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power of feeling. In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning over the litter of the Residency rooms.