nding that the world must needs take infection. What if the
ultimate meaning of British occupation of India be just this--that the
successor of Buddha should be a man born of high-caste, high-minded
British and Indian parents; a fusion of the finest that East and West
can give. That vision may inspire you in your first flush of happy
motherhood. So I feel impelled to pass it on ..."

Such a vision--whether fantasy or prophecy--could not fail to stir
Lilamani Sinclair's Eastern heart to its depths. But she shrank from
sceptical comment; and sceptical Nevil would surely be. As for Roy,
intuition warned her it was too heady an idea to implant in his ardent
brain. So she treasured it secretly, and read it at intervals, and
prayed that, some day, it might be fulfilled--if not through her, then
through some other Lilamani, who should find courage to link her life
with England. Above all, she prayed he who should achieve India's
renewal might spring from Rajasthan....

In the midst of her thinking and praying, she fell sound asleep--to
dream of Roy tossed out of reach on the waves of some large vague
upheaval. The 'how' and 'why' of it all eluded her. Only the vivid
impression remained....

* * * * *

And before the week was out, an upheaval, actual and terrible, burst
upon a startled, unheeding world; a world lulled into a false sense of
security; and too strenuously engaged in rushing headlong round a
centrifugal point called 'progress,' to concern itself with a mythical
peril across the North Sea.

But at the first clear note of danger, devotees of pleasure and progress
and the franchise were transformed, as by magic, into a crowd of
bewildered, curious and resentful human beings, who had suddenly lost
their bearings; who snatched at newspapers; confided in perfect
strangers; protested that a European War was unspeakable, unthinkable,
and all the while could speak and think of nothing else....

It was the nightmare terror of earthquake, when the solid ground
underfoot turns traitor. And it shook even the stoutest nerves in the
opening weeks of the Great War, destined to shatter their dear and
familiar world for months, years, decades perhaps....

But underlying all the froth and fume of the earlier restlessness, of
the later fear and futility, the strong, kindly, imperturbable heart of
the land still beat, sanely--if inconspicuously--in the home life of her
cottages and her great count