so completely taken command of affairs?"

"I'm afraid--it has."

"Yet--you stood up to your mother?"

"Oh, I did--as I've never done yet. But afterwards I realised--it was
only skin deep. She said ... things I can't repeat; but equally ... I
can't forget; things about ... possible children...."

The blood flamed in Roy's sallow face. "Confound her! What does _she_
know about possible children?"

"More than I do, I suppose," Rose admitted, with a pathetic half smile.
"Anyway, after that, she refused to countenance the engagement--the
wedding----"

Roy sat suddenly forward, scorn and anger in his eyes.

"_Refused_----! After the infernal fuss she made over me, because my
father happened to have a title and a garden. And now----" his hand
closed on the edge of the table. "I'm considered a pariah--am I?--simply
on account of my lovely little mother--the guardian angel of us all!"

His blaze of wrath, his low passionate tone, startled her to silence. He
had spoken so seldom of his mother since the first occasion,
that--although she knew--she had far from plumbed the height and depth
of his worship. And instinctively she thought, 'I should have been
jealous into the bargain.'

But Roy had room just then for one consideration only.

"Here have I been coming to her house on sufferance ... polluting her
precious drawing-room, while she's been avoiding me as if I was a leper,
all because I'm the son of a sainted woman, whose shoe she wouldn't have
been worthy ... oh, I beg your pardon----" He checked himself sharply.
"After all--she's _your_ mother."

Rose felt her cheeks growing uncomfortably warm. "I did warn you, in
Lahore, some people felt ... that way."

"Well, I never dreamed they would _behave_ that way. It's not as if I'd
been born and reared in India and might claim relations in her
compound."

"My dear--one can't make her see the difference," Rose urged
desperately.

"Well, I _won't_ stay any longer in her house. I won't eat her food----"

He pushed aside his plate so impatiently that Rose felt almost angry.
But she saw his hand tremble; and covered it with her own.

"Roy--my dear! You're ill; and you're being rather exaggerated over
things----"

"Well, you put me in such a false position. You ought to have told me."

She winced at that and let fall her hand.

"That's all one's reward for trying to save you from jars when you were
knocked up and unhappy. And I told you ... I defied her ... I ...