an English girl on account of his Indian blood. A pleasant predicament
for a man who must needs marry in common duty to his father and
himself.

And what of Tara? Was it possible...? Could that be the meaning of her
final desperate, 'I _can't_ do it, Roy--even for you'! Was it
conceivable--she who loved his mother to the point of worship? Still
smarting from his recent rebuff, he simply could not tell. Thea and
Lance loved her too; yet, in Lance especially, he had been aware of a
tacit tendency to ignore the Indian connection.

The whole complication touched him too nearly, hurt and bewildered him
too bitterly, for cool consideration. He only saw that which had been
his pride converted into a reproach, a two-edged sword barring the way
to marriage: and in the bitterness of his heart he found it hard to
forgive his parents--mainly his father--for putting him in so cruel a
position, with no word of warning to soften the blow.

Perhaps people felt differently in England. If so, India was no place
for him. How blatantly juvenile--to his clouded, tormented brain--seemed
his arrogant dreams of Oxford days! What could such as he do for her, in
this time of tragic upheaval. And how could all the Indias he had
seen--not to mention the many he had not seen--be jumbled together under
that one misleading name? That was the root fallacy of dreamers and
'reformers.' They spoke of her as one, when in truth she was
many--bewilderingly many. The semblance of unity sprang mainly from
England's unparalleled achievement--her Pax Britannica, that held the
scales even between rival chiefs and races and creeds; that had wrought,
in miniature, the very inter-racial stability which Europe had vainly
fought and striven to achieve. Yet now, some malign power seemed
constraining her, in the name of progress, to undo the work of her own
hands....

All his thronging thoughts were tinged with the gloom of his unhopeful
mood; and his body sagged with his sagging spirit. Before he had walked
four miles, his legs refused to carry him any farther.

He had emerged into the open, into full view of the vastness beyond.
Naked rock and stone, jewelled with moss and young green, fell straight
from the path's edge; and one ragged pine, springing from a group of
boulders, was roughly stencilled on blue distances empurpled with
shadows of thunderous cloud.

A flattened boulder proved irresistible; and Roy sat down, leaning his
head against the trunk, sniff