"What--reading?" He shook his head decidedly. "Not while I could be doing anything else." "Not history or poetry?" He looked at her again nervously. But the girl's face was gay, and he ventured on the truth. "Well, no, I can't say I do. My father reads a deal of poetry aloud." "And it bores you?" "Well, I don't understand it," he said, slowly and candidly. "Don't you even read the papers?" asked Diana, wondering. He started. "Why, I should think I do!" he cried. "I should rather think I do! That's another thing altogether--that's not books." "Then perhaps you read the debate last night?" She looked at him with a kindling eye. "Of course I did--every word of it! Do you know what those Radical fellows are up to now? They'll never rest until we've lost the Khaibar--and then the Lord only knows what'll happen." Diana flew into discussion--quick breath, red cheeks! Mrs. Colwood looked on amazed. Presently both appealed to her, the Anglo-Indian. But she smiled and stammered--declining the challenge. Beside their eagerness, their passion, she felt herself tongue-tied. Captain Roughsedge had seen two years' service on the Northwest Frontier; Diana had ridden through the Khaibar with her father and a Lieutenant-Governor. In both the sense of England's historic task as the guardian of a teeming India against onslaught from the north, had sunk deep, not into brain merely. Figures of living men, acts of heroism and endurance, the thought of English soldiers ambushed in mountain defiles, or holding out against Afridi hordes in lonely forts, dying and battling, not for themselves, but that the great mountain barrier might hold against the savagery of the north, and English honor and English power maintain themselves unscathed--these had mingled, in both, with the chivalry and the red blood of youth. The eyes of both had seen; the hearts of both had felt. And now, in the English House of Commons, there were men who doubted and sneered about these things--who held an Afridi life dearer than an English one--who cared nothing for the historic task, who would let India go to-morrow without a pang! Misguided recreants! But Mrs. Colwood, looking on, could only feel that had they never played their impish part, the winter afternoon for these two companions of hers would have been infinitely less agreeable.