-blooded. But, it's just--second nature. He--Lance--understood up to
a point. That's why he was aggressive that day: oh--furiously angry; all
because of you. The pair you are! He said if I fooled you, and didn't
play fair, he'd back out, or insist on a _pucca_ engagement.
And--yes--it did have the wrong effect. It made me wonder--if I _could_
marry a man, however splendid, who owned such exacting standards and
such a hot temper. And there were you--an unknown quantity, with the
Banter-Wrangle discreetly in pursuit. A supreme inducement in
itself!--Yes, distinctly, that afternoon was a turning-point. Just Lance
losing his temper, and you coolly forgetting an arrangement with me----"

She paused, looking back over it all; felt Roy's hold slacken and
unobtrusively withdrew her hand.

"Soon after Kapurthala, he was angry again. And that time, I'm afraid I
reminded him that our engagement was only 'on' conditionally; that if he
started worrying at me, it would soon be unconditionally off----"

"So it _should_ have been!" Roy jerked up on to his elbow, and
confronted her with challenging directness. "Once you could speak like
that, feel like that, you'd no _right_ to keep him hanging on--hoping
when there was practically no hope. It wasn't playing the game----"

This time she kept her eyes averted, and a slow colour invaded her face.
There was a point beyond which feminine frankness could not go. She
could not--would not--tell this unflatteringly critical lover of hers
that it was not in her nature to let the one man go till she felt
morally sure of the other.

Roy had only a profile view of her warm cheek, her sensitive nostril
a-quiver, her lip drawn in. And when she spoke, it was in the tense,
passionate tone of that evening at Anarkalli.

"Oh yes--it's easy work sitting in judgment on other people. I told you
I hadn't much of a case--I asked you to make allowances. You clearly
can't. _He_ asked you--not to hurt me. You clearly feel you must.
Yet--in justice to you both--I'm doing what I can. I've never before
condescended to explain myself--almost excuse myself--to _any_ man; and
I certainly never shall again. It strikes me you'd better apply your own
indictment ... to your own case. If _you_ can think and feel ... as you
seem to do, better face the fact and be done with it----"

But Roy, startled and penitent, was sitting upright by now; and, when
she would have risen, he seized her, crushing her to him, would she