ld travel together. Roy could follow on. And there they two
could be quietly married without fuss or audible comment from their
talkative little world.

It was not precisely her idea of the manner in which she--Rose
Arden--should be given in marriage. But the main point was that--if she
could help it--her mother should not score in the matter of Roy. _Could_
she help it? That was the question persistently knocking at her heart.

And she was only a degree less troubled by the perverse revival of her
feeling for Lance. Vanished--his hold on her deeper nature seemed
mysteriously to strengthen. Memories crowded in, unbidden, of their
golden time together just before Roy appeared on the scene; till she
almost arrived at blaming her deliberately chosen lover for having come
between them and landed her in her present distracting position. For now
it was the ghost of Lance that threatened to come between her and Roy;
and the irony of it cut her to the quick. If she had dealt unfairly by
these two men, whose standards were leagues above her own, she was not,
it seemed, to escape her share of suffering....

For Roy's heart also knew the chill of secret disillusion. The ardour
and thrill of his courtship seemed fatally to have suffered eclipse.
When they were together, the lure of her was potent still. It was in the
gaps between that he felt irked, more and more, by incipient criticism.
In the course of that first talk, she had unwittingly stripped herself
of the glamour that was more than half her charm; and at bottom his
Eastern subconsciousness was jarred by her casual attitude to the
sanctities of the man and woman relation, as instilled into him by his
mother. When he quarrelled with her treatment of Lance, she saw it
merely as a rather exaggerated concern for his friend. There was that in
it, of course; but there was more.

Yet undeniably Desmond's urgent plea influenced his own effort to ignore
the still small voice within him, that protested against the whole
affair. At another time he would have taken it for a clear intimation
from his mother; but she seemed to have lost, or deserted him, these
days. All he could firmly hold on to, at present, was his loyalty to
Lance, his duty to Rose; and both seemed to point in the same
direction.

It struck him as strange that she did not mention the wedding; and she
had been so full of it that very first evening. Once, when he casually
asked if any fixtures were decided on yet,