Aruna?—­poised between crescent light and deepening shadow, looking for sane clear guidance—­and finding none.  A prose sketch, in this vein, stood out from the rest; a fragment of his soul, too intimately self-revealing for the general gaze:  no uncommon dilemma for an artist, precisely when his work is most intrinsically true.  Had he followed the natural urge of his heart, he would have sent it to Aruna.  As it was, he decided to treasure it a little longer for himself alone.

* * * * *

Meantime Dyan—­half forgotten—­suddenly emerged.  It was at a meeting—­exclusively religious and philosophical; but the police had wind of it; and a friendly inspector mentioned it to Krishna Lal.  The chief speaker would be a Swami of impeccable sanctity.  “But if you have a sensitive palate, you will doubtless detect a spice of political powder under the jam of religion!” quoth Krishna Lal, who was a man of humour and no friend of sedition.

“Thanks for the hint,” said Roy—­and groaned in spirit.  Meetings, at best, were the abomination of desolation; and his soul was sick of the Indian variety.  For the ‘silent East’ is never happier than when it is talking at immense length; denouncing, inaugurating, promoting; and a prolonged dose of it stirred in Roy a positive craving for men who shot remarks at each other in ‘straight-flung words and true.’  But no stone must be left unturned.  So he went;—­guided by the friendly policeman, who knew him for a Sahib bent on some personal quest.

Their search ended in a windowless inner room; packed to suffocation; heavy with attar of rose, kerosene, and human bodies; and Roy as usual clung to a doorway that offered occasional respite.

The Swami was already in full flow:—­a wraith of a man in a salmon-coloured garment; his eyes, deep in their sockets, gleaming like black diamonds.  And he was holding his audience spellbound:—­Hindus of every calling; students in abundance; a sprinkling of Sikhs and Dogras from the lines.  Some form of hypnotism,—­was it?  Perhaps.  Even Roy could not listen unmoved, when the spirit shook the frail creature like a gust of wind and the hollow chest-notes vibrated with appeal or command.  Such men—­and India is full of them—­are spiritual dynamos.  Who can calculate their effect on an emotional race?  And they no longer confine their influence to things spiritual.  They, too, have caught the modern disease of politics for the million.  And the supreme appeal is to youth—­plastic and impressionable, aflame with fervours of the blood that can be conjured, by heady words, into fervours infinitely more dangerous to themselves and their country.

In an atmosphere dense with spilled kerosene, with over-breathed air and over-charged emotion, that appeal rang out like a trumpet blast.