Tom spent three days enjoying the hospitality of Gwalior. Before the end of that time, he and the Dewan had become firm friends. In the long nights that they spent together on one of the palace balconies, while the Dewan smoked his hookah and looked up meditatively into the starlit sky, Tom unburdened himself of some of the thoughts and feelings that had possessed him since he entered upon his new life. He was troubled by his inability to lay out the future. 'I make plans one day,' he said, 'and I change them the next, and I find no firm standing-ground anywhere.' He was troubled still more by the dual impulses that governed him, and by the way in which startlingly new thoughts and unbidden imaginations forced themselves upon his mind. 'I thought I knew myself,' he said sadly; 'but I find that my very will is not my own.' The Dewan consoled him. 'It is a time of transition with you,' he said. 'The new has not yet accommodated itself with the old. Western ideas, and, if I may venture to say so, Western prejudices, are warring in your mind with the Orientalism which is its true element. You will settle down in time and then you will take the best out of both. Who knows that the Great Spirit may not have decreed that you shall be one of the reconcilers for whom the world is waiting? Your father, the great Byrajee Pirtha Raj, of blessed memory, believed that such would be, and that only then, when the East learned from the West and the West from the East, as now they interchange terrestrial products, would the earth and her long-troubled children enter upon the holy path that leads to spiritual freedom.' 'And do you think this time is near?' said Tom, trembling. 'Nay,' answered the Dewan, smiling. 'I am no prophet. The future is with the gods.' 'But you think that England does well to maintain her power in India?' 'I know that in England is our only hope. They are preaching independence to the people,' cried the Dewan, his excitement rising as he spoke. 'Govern yourselves, they say. Be free men! Throw the invaders from the West into the sea! The fools! Do they know what they mean? Are we then one nation in India? Can we be governed by ourselves? They know very well that we cannot. There is not one preacher of sedition at this moment who is not well aware that the retreat of the English would introduce a period of anarchy such as even our unhappy country has never known. And how could it be otherwise? Moslems, Hindustanis, Bengalis, Mahrattas, Sikhs, Punjaubis, Ghoorkas, hill tribes of the north, and hill tribes of the south--we are far more foreigners to one another than French and English, Spaniards and Germans. Which of all these, I ask you, shall govern the others? Who are to be the free and independent men, and who are to be the slaves?' 'The strongest would come to the front,' said Tom.