She was no longer the apple-blossom vision of the morning.  She wore her mother-o’-pearl sari with its narrow gold border.  Her dress, that was the colour of a dove’s wing, shimmered changefully as she moved, and her aquamarine pendant gleamed like drops of sea water on its silver chain.

Roy loved her in the mother-o’-pearl mood best of all; and he saw, with a throb of pride, how the important Boy-from-India seemed too absorbed in watching her even to show off.  She did not stay many minutes and she said very little.  She was still, by preference, quiet during a meal; and it gave her a secret thrill of pleasure to see the habit of her own race reappearing as an instinct in Roy.  So, with merely a word or two, she just smiled at them and gave them things and patted their heads.  And when she was gone, Roy felt better.  The scales had swung even again.  What was a school blazer and twenty runs at cricket, compared with the glory of having a mother like that?

But if tea was not much fun, after tea was worse.

They were told to run and play in the garden; and obediently they ran out, dog and all.  But what could you play at with a superior being who had made twenty runs not out, in a House Match—­whatever that might be?  They showed him their ring-doves and their rabbits; but he didn’t even pretend to be interested, though Tara did her best, because it was she who had brought this infliction on Roy.

“How about the summer-house?” she suggested, hopefully.  For the summer-house locker contained an assortment of old tennis-bats, mallets and balls, that might prove more stimulating than rabbits and doves.  Roy offered no objection; so they straggled across a corner of the lawn to a narrower strip behind the tall yew hedge.

The grown-ups were gathered under the twin beeches; and away at the far end of the lawn Roy’s mother and Tara’s mother were strolling up and down in the sun.

Again Roy noticed how Joe Bradley stared:  and as they rounded the corner of the hedge he remarked suddenly “I say!  There’s that swagger ayah of yours walking with Lady Despard.  She’s jolly smart, for an ayah.  Did you bring her from India?  You never said you’d been there.”

Roy started and went hot all over.  “Well, I have—­just on a visit.  And she’s not an ayah.  She’s my Mummy!”

Joe Bradley opened his mouth as well as his eyes, which made him look plainer than ever.

“Golly! what a tale!  White people don’t have ayahs for Mothers—­not in my India.  I s’pose your Pater married her out there?”

“He didn’t.  And I tell you she’s not an ayah.”

Roy’s low voice quivered with anger.  It was as if ten thousand little flames had come alight inside him.  But you had to try and be polite to visitors; so he added with a virtuous effort:  “She’s a really and truly Princess—­so there!”

But that unspeakable boy, instead of being impressed, laughed in the rudest way.