ed. Instinctively,
Roy looked round for Lance. No sign of him in the ballroom or the
card-room. And the crowded place seemed empty without him. It was queer.

Later on, he ran up against Barnard, who told him that Lance had gone
home.

CHAPTER VII

"Of the unspoken word thou art master. The spoken word is master of
thee."--_Arab Proverb_.

Roy drove home with Barnard in the small hours, still too overwrought
for clear thinking, and too exhausted all through to lie awake for five
minutes after his head touched the pillow. For the inner stress and
combat had been sharper than he knew.

He woke late to find Terry curled up against his legs, and the bungalow
empty of human sounds. The other three were up long since, and gone to
early parade. His head was throbbing. He felt limp, as if all the vigour
had been drained out of him. And suddenly ... he remembered....

Not in a lover's rush of exaltation, but with a sharp reaction almost
amounting to fear, the truth dawned on him that he was no longer his own
man. In a passionate impulse, he had virtually surrendered himself and
his future into the hands of a girl whom he scarcely knew. He still saw
the whole thing as mainly her doing--and it frightened him. Looking
backward over the past weeks, reviewing the steps by which he had
arrived at last night's involuntary culmination, he felt more frightened
than ever.

And yet--there sprang a vision of her, pale and gracious in the
starshine, when she leaned to him at parting....

She was wonderful and beautiful--and she was his. Any man worth his salt
would feel proud. And he did feel proud--in the intervals of feeling
horribly afraid of himself and her. Especially her. Girls were amazing
things. You seized hold of one and spoke mad words, and nearly crushed
the life out of her, and she took it almost as calmly as if you had
asked for an extra dance. Was it a protective layer of insensibility--or
super-normal self-control? Would she, Rose, have despised him had she
guessed that even at the height of his exultation he had felt ashamed of
having let himself go so completely; and that before there had been any
word of marriage--any clear desire of it even in the deep of his heart?

That was really the root of his trouble. The passing recoil from an
ardent avowal is no uncommon experience with the finer types of men.
But, to Roy, it seemed peculiarly unfitting that the son of his mother
should, as it were, st