nd indecisions; the magnetism of Home and the
dread of it; the difficulty of making things clear to his father. And
the magic of her touch charmed away all inner confusions, all headache
and heartache. But when he rose impulsively, and would have taken her in
his arms--she was gone; everything was gone; ... the hammock, the
beeches, the sunbeams....

He was standing alone on a moonlit plain, blotched and streaked with
shadows of dak-jungle and date-palm; and rising out of it abruptly--as
he had seen it last night--loomed the black bulk of Chitor; the sacred,
solitary ghost of a city, linked with his happiest days of childhood and
his mother's heroic tales. The great rock was scarped and bastioned,
every line of it. The walls, ruined in parts, showed ghostly shades of
ruins beyond; and soaring high above all, Khumba Rana's nine-storied
Tower of Victory lifted a giant finger to the unheeding heavens.
Watching it, fascinated, trying in vain to make out details, he was
startlingly beset by the strangest among many strange sensations that
had visited his imaginative brain: nothing less than a revival of the
long-ago dream-feeling, the strange sense of familiarity--he knew!
Beyond all cavil, he knew every line of that looming shadow, every curve
of the hills. He knew the exact position of the old bridge over the
Gamberi river. From the spot where he stood, he could find his way
unerringly to the Padal Pol--the fortified entrance to the road of Seven
Gates;--the road that had witnessed, three times in three hundred years,
that heroic alternative to surrender, the terrible rite of Johur:--the
final down-rush of every male defender, wearing the saffron robe and
coronet of him who embraces death as a bride; the awful slaughter at the
lowest gate, where they fell, every man of them, before the victors
entered in....

The horror and savage exaltation of it all stirred, so sensibly, in his
veins that he caught himself dimly wondering--was it he, Roy Sinclair,
who stood there remembering these things--or another...?

And before that crazy question could resolve itself--behold he was lying
wide awake again in his ruckled bed, on the lumpy pillow, staring at the
wide patch of moonlight framed by his open door.

Not morning _yet_, confound it all! But the tiredness and loneliness
were clean gone. It was always so when she came to him thus. Tacitly, he
knew it, and she knew it, for a visitation. There was no delusion of
having got he