Too, generation after generation, they had been born in India. Both Hector and his brother had first seen the light of day in some stinking, miasmic Central Indian cantonment, and they had never forgotten a word of the native dialect which their brown Behari nurse had taught them before they had learned a word of English. Not only that. There was, furthermore, an old tradition, its original cause lost in the mists of the past, by which every Wade of Dealle was given a thorough grounding in Persian, the language which is to the polite Moslem elements of India and Central Asia what French was to the European society of a generation earlier.
Thus India had always been home to them. Perhaps more than home. It seemed axiomatic that the land which they had mulched with their blood, the land where they had fought and suffered and conquered and achieved and died, should mean more to them than the soft, rational commonplaces of that Sussex which to-day was nothing to them but a sentimental memory—mortgaged to the hilt.
And it was of India that Hector thought, almost instinctively, as he left Waterloo Station, with the sandy-haired gentleman's of Upper Thames Street taxicab rolling along in his wake.
India! Rather, all the glittering, resplendent, improbable East!
He had not been there since he was a child, and his five years in the Dragoons had all been spent in English and Irish barracks and cantonments.
But, as his machine whirred away, clear through
