nt curse to me. Naturally, the
moment I'd fixed things up, came Lance's letter about you. But I
couldn't back out. And I suppose it's all right?"

"Well, of course." Roy was troubled with no doubts on that score. "What
a family you are! I was hoping to pick up threads with Aruna."

"You shall. But you must be discreet. Jaipur isn't exactly Oxford.
Brother and cousin are almost the same word with them; but still----"

"Is she at the hospital now?" Roy cut in irrelevantly. Her insistence on
discretion--with Aruna, of all people--struck him as needless fussing
and unlike Thea. And by now he was feeling more impatient to see Aruna
than to see Jaipur.

"No. But she seemed shy of appearing at tiffin. So I said if she came
out here afterwards, she would find you and me alone. She's looked
happier and less fragile lately. Even Vinx admits the event has
justified me. But of course it's simply an emergency plan--a
transition----"

"To _what_?" Roy challenged her with surprising emphasis.

"That's my puzzle of puzzles. Perhaps you can help me solve it.
Sometimes I wonder if she knows herself, what she wants out of life....
But perhaps I haven't the key to her waverings...."

At that moment, a slight unmistakable figure stepped from the shadow of
the verandah down the shallow steps flanked with pots of begonia; moving
with the effortless grace that Roy's heart knew too well. Dress and sari
were carnation pink. Her golden shoes glittered at every step: and she
pensively twirled a square Japanese parasol--almond blossoms and
butterflies scattered abroad on silk of the frailest blue.

"_Is_ their instinct for that sort of thing unconscious, I wonder?"
murmured Thea. "You shall have half an hour with her, to pick up
threads. Help me if you can, Roy. But--_be discreet_!"

Roy scarcely heard her. He had gone suddenly very still--his gaze
riveted on Aruna. The Indian dress, the carriage of her veiled head,
the leisured grace, so sharply smote him that tears pricked his eyelids;
and, for one intoxicating moment he was wafted, in spirit, across the
chasm of the War to that dear dream-world of youth, when all distances
were blue and all the near prospect bright with the dew of the morning.
Only under a mask-like stillness could he hide that startling uprush of
emotion; and had Broome been watching him, he would have seen the subtle
film of the East steal over his face.

Thea saw only his sudden abstraction and the whitened knuckle