father, yet in essence a replica of her mother, with the same wing-like
brows and dark limpid eyes. Dimly jealous of Tara, she was the only one
of the three who relished the presence of the intruder and wished
strange boys oftener came to tea.

Millicent, the nursery-maid, presided. She was tall and smiling and
obviously a lady. She watched and listened and said little during the
meal.

Once, in the course of it, Lilamani came in and hovered round them,
filling Roy's tea-cup, spreading Christine's honey--extra thick. Her
Eastern birthright of service, her joy in waiting on those she loved,
had survived ten years of English marriage, and would survive ten more.
It was as much an essential part of her as the rhythm of her pulses and
the blood in her veins.

She was no longer the apple-blossom vision of the morning. She wore her
mother-o'-pearl sari with its narrow gold border. Her dress, that was
the colour of a dove's wing, shimmered changefully as she moved, and her
aquamarine pendant gleamed like drops of sea water on its silver chain.

Roy loved her in the mother-o'-pearl mood best of all; and he saw, with
a throb of pride, how the important Boy-from-India seemed too absorbed
in watching her even to show off. She did not stay many minutes and she
said very little. She was still, by preference, quiet during a meal; and
it gave her a secret thrill of pleasure to see the habit of her own race
reappearing as an instinct in Roy. So, with merely a word or two, she
just smiled at them and gave them things and patted their heads. And
when she was gone, Roy felt better. The scales had swung even again.
What was a school blazer and twenty runs at cricket, compared with the
glory of having a mother like that?

But if tea was not much fun, after tea was worse.

They were told to run and play in the garden; and obediently they ran
out, dog and all. But what _could_ you play at with a superior being who
had made twenty runs not out, in a House Match--whatever that might be?
They showed him their ring-doves and their rabbits; but he didn't even
pretend to be interested, though Tara did her best, because it was she
who had brought this infliction on Roy.

"How about the summer-house?" she suggested, hopefully. For the
summer-house locker contained an assortment of old tennis-bats, mallets
and balls, that might prove more stimulating than rabbits and doves. Roy
offered no objection; so they straggled across a corner of the law