resence in the last hours of a summer day....

Oxford--shrine of the oldest creeds and the newest fads--given over, for
one hilarious week, to the yearly invasion of mothers and sisters and
cousins, and girls that were neither; especially girls that were
neither....

Two of the punts, clearly containing one party, kept close enough
together for the occupants to exchange sallies of wit, or any blissful
foolishness in keeping with the blissfully foolish mood of a moonlight
picnic up the river in 'Commem.'

Roy Sinclair's party boasted the distinction of including one mother,
Lady Despard; and one grandfather, Cuthbert Broome; and Roy himself--a
slender, virile figure in flannels, and New College tie--was poling the
first punt.

As in boyhood, so now, his bearing and features were Nevil incarnate.
But to the shrewd eye of Broome the last seemed subtly overlaid with the
spirit of the East--a brooding stillness wrought from the clash of
opposing forces within. When he laughed and talked it vanished. When he
fell silent, and drifted away from his surroundings, it reappeared.

It was precisely this hidden quality, so finely balanced, that
intrigued the brain of the novelist, as distinct from the heart of the
godfather. Which was the real Roy? Which would prove the decisive factor
at the critical corners of his destiny? To what heights would it carry
him--into what abyss might it plunge him--that gleam from the ancient
soul of things? Would India--and his young glorification of India--be,
for him, a spark of inspiration or a stone of stumbling?

Broome had not seen much of the boy, intimately, since the New Year; and
he did not need spectacles to discern some inner ferment at work. Roy
was more talkative and less communicative than usual; and Broome let him
talk, reading between the lines. He knew to a nicety the moment when a
chance question will kill confidence--or evoke it. He suspected one of
those critical corners. He also suspected one of those Indian cousins of
his: delightful, both of them; but still....

The question remained, which was it--the girl or the boy?

The girl, Aruna--student at Somerville College--was reclining among vast
blue and pink cushions in the bows, pensively twirling a Japanese
parasol, one arm flung round the shoulders of her companion--a
fellow-student; fair and stolid and good-humoured. Broome summed her up
mentally: "Tactless but trustworthy. Anglo-Saxon to the last button on
her ready