The time was passing, and still the world was quiet.  The hour must be close on midnight, and still there was no sign of men.  For the first time he dared to hope for success.  Before, an hour’s delay was all that he had sought.  To give the north time for a little preparation, to make defence possible, had been his aim; now with the delay he seemed to see a chance for victory.  Bardur would be alarmed hours ago; men would be on the watch all over Kashmir and the Punjab; the railways would be guarded.  The invader would find at the least no easy conquest.  When they had trodden his life out in the defile they would find stronger men to bar their path, and he would not have died in vain.  It was a slender satisfaction for vanity, for what share would he have in the defence?  Unknown, unwept, he would perish utterly, and to others would be the glory.  He did not care, nay, he rejoiced in the brave obscurity.  He had never sought so vulgar a thing as fame.  He was going out of life like a snuffed candle.  George, if George survived, would know nothing of his death.  He was miles beyond the frontier, and if George, after months of war, should make his way to this fatal cleft, what trace would he find of him?  And all his friends, Wratislaw, Arthur Mordaunt, the folk of Glenavelin—­no word would ever come to them to tell them of his end.

But Alice—­and in one wave there returned to him the story which he had striven to put out of his heart.  She had known him in his weakness, but she would never think of him in his strength.  The whimsical fate pleased him.  The last meeting on that grey autumn afternoon at the Broken Bridge had heartened him for his travellings.  It had been a compact between them; and now he was redeeming the promise of the tryst.  And she would never know it, would only know that somewhere and somehow he had ceased to struggle with an inborn weakness.  Well-a-day!  It was no world of rounded corners and complete achievements.  It was enough if a hint, a striving, a beginning were found in the scheme of man’s frailty.  He had no clear-cut conception of a future-that was the happy lot of the strong-hearted—­but he had a generous intolerance of little success.  He did not ask rewards, but he prayed for the hope of a good beginning or a gallant failure.  The odd romance which lies in the wanderer’s brain welcomed the paradox.  Alice and her bright hair floated dim on the horizon of his vision, something exquisite and dear, a memory, a voice, a note of tenderness in this last exhilaration.  A sentimental passion was beyond him; he was too critical of folly to worship any lost lady; and he had no love for vain reminiscences.  But the girl had become the embodied type of the past.  A year ago he had not seen her, now she was home and childhood and friends to him.  For a moment there was the old heart-hunger, but the pain had gone.  The ineffectual longing which had galled him had perished at the advent of his new strength.