and sand; with a comfortable clubhouse at one end of it and this primeval monument at the other.  They did not actually use this archaic abyss as a bunker, because it was by tradition unfathomable, and even for practical purposes unfathomed.  Any sporting projectile sent into it might be counted most literally as a lost ball.  But they often sauntered round it in their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes, and one of them had just come down from the clubhouse to find another gazing somewhat moodily into the well.

Both the Englishmen wore light clothes and white pith helmets and puggrees, but there, for the most part, their resemblance ended.  And they both almost simultaneously said the same word, but they said it on two totally different notes of the voice.

“Have you heard the news?” asked the man from the club.  “Splendid.”

“Splendid,” replied the man by the well.  But the first man pronounced the word as a young man might say it about a woman, and the second as an old man might say it about the weather, not without sincerity, but certainly without fervor.

And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of them.  The first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native heat in his face that did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather to the ardors and ambitions of the West.  The other was an older man and certainly an older resident, a civilian official—­Horne Fisher; and his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the paradox of the Englishman in the East.  He was much too hot to be anything but cool.

Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was splendid.  That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about something that everybody knew.  The striking victory over a menacing combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking victories, was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.

“Now, no other nation in the world could have done a thing like that,” cried Captain Boyle, emphatically.

Horne Fisher was still looking silently into the well; a moment later he answered:  “We certainly have the art of unmaking mistakes.  That’s where the poor old Prussians went wrong.  They could only make mistakes and stick to them.  There is really a certain talent in unmaking a mistake.”

“What do you mean,” asked Boyle, “what mistakes?”

“Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could chew,” replied Horne Fisher.  It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in two million was ever allowed to hear of.  “And it was certainly jolly lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time.  Odd how often the right thing’s been done for us by the second in command, even when a great man was first in command.  Like Colborne at Waterloo.”