“A full meeting, brother.  Your friend speaks well?”

Dyan turned with a start.  “Where are you from, that you have not heard him?” He scrutinised Roy’s appearance.  “A hill man——?”

Roy edged nearer and spoke in English under his breath.  “Dyan—­look at me.  Don’t make a scene.  I am Roy—­from Jaipur.”

In spite of the warning, Dyan drew back sharply. “What are you here for—­spying?”

“No.  Hoping to find you.  Because—­I care; and Aruna cares——­”

“Better to care less and understand more,” Dyan muttered brusquely.  “No time for talk now.  Listen.  You may learn a few things Oxford could not teach.”

The implied sneer enraged Roy; but listen he must, perforce:  and in the space of half an hour he learnt a good deal about Chandranath and the mentality of his type.

To the outer ear, he was propounding the popular modern doctrine of ‘Yoga by action.’  To the inner ear he was extolling passion and rebellion in terms of a creed that enjoins detachment from both; inciting to political murder, under sanction of the divine dictum, ’Who kills the body kills naught ...  Thy concern is with action alone, never with results.’  And his heady flights of rhetoric, like those of the Swami, were frankly aimed at the scores of half-fledged youths who hung upon his utterance.

“What are the first words of the young child?  What are the first words in your own hearts?” he cried, indicating that organ with a dramatic forefinger. “I want!  It is the passionate cry of youth.  By indomitably uttering it, he can dislodge mountains into the sea.  And in India to-day there exist mountains necessary to be hurled into the sea!” His significant pause was not lost on his hearers—­or on Roy.  “‘Many-branched and endless are the thoughts of the irresolute.’  But to him who cries ardently, ‘I want,’ there is no impediment, except paucity of courage to snatch the seductive object.  Deaf to the anaemic whisper of compunction, remembering that sin taints only the weak, he will be translated to that dizzy eminence, where right and wrong, truth and untruth, become as pigmies, hardly discerned by the naked eye.  There dwells Kali—­the shameless and pitiless; and believing our country that deity incarnate, her needs must be our gods.  ’Her image make we in temple after temple—­Bande Mataram?’” The invocation was flung back to him in a ragged shout.  Here and there a student leapt to his feet brandishing a clenched fist.  “Compose your laudable intoxication, brothers.  I do not say, ‘Be violent.’  There is a necromancy of the spirit more potent than weapons of the flesh:—­the delusion of irresistible suggestion that will conquer even truth itself....”

Abstraction piled on abstraction; perversion on perversion; and that deluded crowd plainly swallowing it all as gospel truth——!  To Roy the whole exhibition was purely disgustful; as if the man had emptied a dust-bin under his aristocratic nose.  Once or twice he glanced covertly at Dyan, standing beside him; at the strained intentness of his face, the nervous clenched hand.  Was this the same Dyan who had ridden and argued and read ‘Greats’ with him only four years ago—­this hypnotised being who seemed to have forgotten his existence——?