“Afraid?  I would love it—­if Thea will allow.”  This time she did not look up.

Vincent and Thea were sitting a little farther along the balustrade; Lance beside them, imbibing tales of Rajasthan.  Flossie and her Captain had already disappeared.

“I’m going to be frankly a Goth and flash my electric torch into holes and corners,” Lance announced as the other two came up.  “I bar being intimidated by ghosts.”

“We’re not going to be intimidated either,” said Roy, addressing himself to Thea.  “And I guarantee not to let Aruna be spirited away.”

Vincent shot a look at his wife.  “Don’t wander too far,” said he.

“And don’t hang about too long,” she added.  “It’ll be cold going home.”

Though he was standing close to her, she could say no more.  But, under cover of the dusk, her hand found his and closed on it hard.

The characteristic impulse heartened him amazingly, as he followed Aruna down the ghostly stairway, through marble cloisters into the hanging garden, misted with moonlight, fragrant with orange trees.

And now there was more than Thea’s hand-clasp to uphold him.  Gradually there dawned on him a faint yet sure intimation of his mother’s presence, of her tenderly approving love—­dim to his brain, yet as sensible to his spirit as light and warmth to his body.

It did not last many moments; but—­as in all contact with her—­the clear after-certainty remained....

Exactly what he intended to say he did not know even now.  To speak the cruel truth, yet by some means to soften the edge of it, seemed almost impossible.  But nerved by this vivid, exalted sense of her nearness, the right moment, the right words could be trusted to come of themselves....

And Aruna, walking beside him in a hushed expectancy, was remembering that other night, so strangely far away, when they had walked alone under the same moon, and assurance of his love had so possessed her, that she had very nearly broken her little chiragh.  And to-night—­how different!  Her very love for him, though the same, was not quite the same.  It seemed to depend not at all on nearness or response.  Starved of both, it had grown not less, but more.

From a primitive passion it had become a rarefied emotional atmosphere in which she lived and moved.  And this garden of eerie lights and shadows was saturated with it; thronged, to her fancy, with ghosts of dead passions and intrigues, of dead Queens, in whom the twin flames of love and courage could be quenched only by flames of the funeral pyre.  Their blood ran in her veins—­and in his too. That closeness of belonging none could snatch from her.  About the other, she was growing woefully uncertain, as day followed day, and still no word.  Was there trouble after all!  Would he speak to-night...?

They had reached a dark doorway, and he was trying the handle.  It opened inwards.