the cause he held in trust. He bred thee, fed thee, and sent thee
oversea to grow, that in the end India might gain! Thou and I are but
servants of the peace, as he was. If I serve thee, and thou the Raj--
though the two of us were weaned on the milk of war and get our bread
by war--we will none the less serve peace! Aie! For what is honor
if a soldier lets it rust? Of what use is service, mouthed and ready,
but ungiven? It is good, Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, that thou art come at
last!"

He saluted and backed out through the swinging door. He had come in
his uniform of risaldar of the elder Cunningham's now disbanded
regiment, so he had not removed his boots as another native--and he
himself if in mufti--would have done. Young Cunningham heard him go
swaggering and clanking and spur-jingling down the corridor as though
he had half a troop of horse behind him and wanted Asia to know it!

It was something of a brave beginning that, for a twenty-one-year-old!
Something likely--and expressly calculated by Mahommed Gunga--to
bring the real man to the surface. He had been no Cunningham unless
his sense of duty had been very near the surface--no Englishman, had
he not been proud that men of a foreign, conquered race should think
him worthy of all that honor; and no man at all if his eye had been
quite dry when the veteran light-horseman swaggered out at last and
left him to his own reflections.

He had not been human if he had not felt a little homesick still,
although home to him had been a place where a man stayed with distant
relatives between the intervals of school. He felt lonely, in spite of
his reception--a little like a baby on the edge of all things new and
wonderful. He would have been no European if he had not felt the heat,