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.
For certainly denunication and argument became Diana--all the more that she was no "female franzy" who must have all the best of the talk; she listened--she evoked--she drew on, and drew out.

Mrs.Colwood was secretly sure that this very modest and ordinarily stupid young man had never talked so well before, that his mother would have been astonished could she have beheld him.