From then on, Durand would refer to his jilted lover as "poor Mrs Neville". He also penned an epic of self-loathing, a long poem called Love: "Why did she love him? A deathless love/For a coward who could never feel its worth./Ask of the terrible gods above,/Who mould and fashion the loves of earth." Bizarrely, this doomed relationship suddenly resurfaced just as he started his negotiations in Afghanistan in 1893, when its damaging effect on his marriage suddenly became a major distraction from his diplomatic work. 

When Durand travelled to Kabul, he left his wife, Ella — a noted Anglo-Indian beauty with whom he had two children — at their home in Calcutta. The swift Indian mail service kept them in close communication, aided by a telegraph line that had been laid from Afghanistan to Peshawar, across the Khyber Pass. Durand had hoped to be reading loving letters of support. Instead, he found himself confronting a series of anguished questions from Ella, who had, it seems, previously known nothing of his former love: the likelihood is that, during his absence, she had found a cache of old letters from Mrs Neville. 

On October 13, 1893, as he settled into his Kabul quarters, he began his journal entry by discussing his diplomatic prospects. But he couldn't help but mention what was really on his mind: "Ella unhappy about Mrs Neville — answered." "No letter from Ella, which makes one's day a blank," he wrote next day. "I fear she is vexed about poor Mrs Neville." With Durand unable to reassure his wife in person, her anxieties continued to dog him until he returned two months later. 

To modern eyes, Durand's political views seem equally alien. Naturally, he did not begin to question the validity of Britain's imperial mission. "Most of these races...have been accustomed for centuries to foreign rule," he wrote a few months before his talks with the Amir. "On the whole, I think they are not dissatisfied with us as the supreme power. We hold the balance fairly, we oppress no one, and maintain peace with a strong hand; and under our rule all India has order and liberty such as it never had before."

However, Durand also believed passionately in the innate racial superiority of the English — as opposed, it may be noted, to the British. His novel, Helen Trevelyan, or The Ruling Race, published just a few months before he went to Kabul, was his manifesto — his chance, as he put it in a letter to Sir William Lockhart, a general who led numerous campaigns against the Pathan tribes, to "say certain things about India and the race, and I knew that unless I wrote them in novel form I should have no readers". 

The historian Bernard Porter has suggested that far from being "steeped" in imperial fervour, the British were generally "absent-minded Imperialists", who, for much of the period of the Empire's existence, paid it little attention. Durand would have agreed. His big complaint, expressed through the mouth of Colonel Russell, the hero of his novel, was that his countrymen back home did not appreciate the sacrifices made to secure the Empire. For generations, he wrote, while "little angry politicians" had fought their trivial battles in Westminster, "millions of Englishmen all over the world, regardless of petty squabbles and party cries, have been steadily bearing forward the English flag...Their graves are everywhere; the earth and sea are full of their dead." And with the flag, Durand added, "go freedom and order and justice".