lace, was bread and wine to his soul; but
acute loneliness of the dak bungalow order was not in the bond. For four
years he had felt himself part of a huge incarnate purpose; intimately
part of his regiment--a closely-knit brotherhood of action. Now, the
mere fact of being an unattached human fragment oddly intensified his
feeling of isolation. With all his individuality, he was no egoist; and
very much a lover of his kind. Imbued with the spirit of the quest, yet
averse by temperament to ploughing the lonely furrow.

It had been his own choice--if you could call it so,--starting this way,
instead of in the friendly atmosphere of the Jaipur Residency. But was
there really such a thing as choice? The fact was, he had simply obeyed
an irresistible impulse,--and to-morrow he would be glad of it.
To-night, after that interminable journey, his head ached atrociously.
He felt limp as a wet dish-clout; his nerves all out of gear ... Perhaps
those confounded doctors were not such fools as they seemed. He cursed
himself for a spineless ineffectual--messing about with nerves when he
had been lucky enough to come through four years of war with his full
complement of limbs and faculties unimpaired. Two slight wounds, a
passing collapse, from utter fatigue and misery, soon after his mother's
death; a spell of chronic dysentery, during which he had somehow managed
to keep more or less fit for duty;--that was his record of physical
damage, in a War that had broken its tens of thousands for life.

But there are wounds of the mind; and the healing of them is a slow,
complex affair. Roy, with his fastidious sense of beauty, his almost
morbid shrinking from inflicted pain, had suffered acutely, where more
robust natures scarcely suffered at all. Yet it was the robust that went
to pieces--which was one of the many surprises of a War that shattered
convictions wholesale, and challenged modern man to the fiercest trial
of faith at a moment when Science had almost stripped him bare of belief
in anything outside himself.

Roy, happily for him, had not been stripped of belief; and his receptive
mind, had been ceaselessly occupied registering impressions, to be flung
off, later, in prose and verse, that _She_ might share them to the full.
A slim volume--published, at her wish, in 1916--had attracted no small
attention in the critical world. At the time, he had deprecated
premature rushings into print; but afterwards it was a blessed thing to
r