lousy--as in Desmond's day.

Instead she suddenly knew the first insidious prick of middle age; felt
dazed, for a mere moment, by the careless radiance of their youth; to
them an unconsidered thing: but to those who feel it relentlessly
slipping through their fingers ...

Her small fine hands clenched in unconscious response to her thought.
She was nearing forty. In her own land she would be reckoned almost an
old woman. But some magic in the air and way of life in this cool green
England seemed to keep age at bay: and there remained within a
flame-like youth of the spirit--not so easy, even for the Arch-Thief to
steal away....

CHAPTER V.

"The bow saith to the arrow, 'Thy freedom is mine.'"
--RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

And while Lilamani reasoned with the son--whose twofold nature they had
themselves bestowed and inspired--Nevil was pacing his shrine of all the
harmonies, heart and brain disturbed, as they had not been for years.

Out of the troubled waters of family friction and delicate adjustments,
this adventurous pair had slid into a haven of peace and mutual
understanding. And now behold, fresh portent of trouble arising from the
dual strain in Roy--the focal point of their life and love.

Turning in his stride, his eye encountered a head and shoulders portrait
of his father, Sir George Sinclair: an honest, bluff, unimaginative
face: yet suddenly, arrestingly, it commanded his attention. Checking
his walk, he stood regarding it: and his heart went out to the kindly
old man in a quite unusual wave of sympathetic understanding. He saw
himself--the "damned unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante,
frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition--now standing, more or less,
in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the
boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips
into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his
secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father
must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point
of view save his own. And there was Roy--like himself in the twenties,
but how much more purposeful!--drawn irresistibly by the lure of the
horizon; a lure bristling with dangers the more insidious because they
sprang from the blood in his veins.

Yet a word of warning, spoken at the wrong moment, in the wrong tone,
might be disastrously misunderstood;