not. Jerry--after three years in a
German prison--was a nervous wreck; still undergoing treatment; humanly
lost, for the time being. Tiny was absorbed in her husband and an even
Tinier baby, called Nevil Le Roy, after himself. Tara was not yet home;
but coming before long, because Aunt Helen had broken down, between war
work and the shock of Atholl's death.

A queer thing--separation, mused Roy, as Suraj slowed down to a walk and
the glare of morning flamed along the sky. There were they--and here was
he: close relations, in effect; almost strangers in fact. There was more
between him and them than several hundred miles of sea. There was the
bottomless gulf of the War; the gulf of his bitter grief and the slow
climb up from the depths to Pisgah heights of revelation. Impossible to
communicate--even had he willed--those inner, vital experiences at
Chitor and Jaipur. And he had certainly neither will nor power to
enlarge on his present turmoil of heart and mind.

Since his ride with Rose Arden, after the dinner-party, things seemed to
have taken a new turn. Their relation was no longer tentative. She
seemed tacitly to regard him as her chosen cavalier; and he, as tacitly,
fell in with the arrangement. No denying he felt flattered a little;
subjugated increasingly by a spell he could neither analyse nor resist,
because he had known nothing quite like it before. He was, in truth,
paying the penalty for those rare and beautiful years of early manhood
inspired by worship of his mother. For every virtue, every gift, the
gods exact a price. And he was paying it now. Deep down within him,
something tugged against that potent spell. Yet increasingly it
prevailed and lured him from his work. The vivid beings of his brain
were fading into bloodless unrealities; in which state he could do
nothing with them. Yet Broome's encouragement, and his father's critical
appreciation of fragments lately sent Home, had fired him to
fulfil--more than fulfil--their expectations. And now--here he was
tripped up again by his all-too-human capacity for emotion--as at
Jaipur.

The comparison jerked him. The two experiences, like the two women, had
almost nothing in common. The charm of Aruna--with its Eastern mingling
of the sensuous and spiritual--was a charm he intimately understood. It
combined a touch of the earth with a rarefied touch of the stars. In
Rose Arden, so far, he had discovered no touch of the stars. She
suggested, rather, a day in