was thankful for urgent trifles that helped
to divert attention from the waiting shadow. Even to-day, as always,
dress and sari were instinctively chosen to express her mood:--the
mother-of-pearl mood; iridescence of glad and sad: glad to give; yet
aching to keep. Daughter of Rajputs though she was, she had her moment
of very human shrinking when the sharp actuality of parting was upon
them; when he held her so close and long that she felt as if the
tightened cord round her heart must snap--and there an end....

But, by some miracle, some power not her own, courage held; though, when
he released her, she was half blinded with tears.

Her last words--entirely like herself though they were--surprised him.

"Son of my heart--live for ever," she whispered, laying light hands on
his breast. "And when you go into the battle, always keep strongly in
your mind that They must _not_ win, because no sacred or beautiful thing
would be left clean from their touch. And when you go into the battle
always remember--Chitor."

"It is _you_ I shall always remember--looking like this," he answered
under his breath. But he never forgot her injunctions; and through years
of fighting, he obeyed them to the letter....

* * * * *

That was in April, after Neuve Chapelle, when even optimists admitted
that the War might last a year.

At Christmas time he came home on short leave--a changed Roy; his skin
browner; his sensitive lips more closely set under the shadow line of
his moustache; the fibre of body and spirit hardened, without loss of
fineness or flexibility. Livelier on the surface, he was graver, more
reticent, underneath--even with her. By the look in his eyes she knew he
had seen things that could never be put into words. Some of them she too
had seen, through his mind; so close was the spiritual link between
them. In that respect at least, he was beautifully, unaffectedly the
same....

Nevil was home too, for that wonderful Christmas; and Tara, changed
also, in her own vivid way; frank and friendly with Roy; though the
grown-up veil between them was seldom lifted now. For the War held them
both in its unrelaxing grip; satisfied, in terrible and tremendous
fashion, the hidden desire--not uncommon in young things, though
concealed like a vice--to suffer for others. Everything else, for the
time being, seemed a side issue. Personal affairs could wait....

When it came to letting Nevil and Roy go ag