The puzzle of these increasing race complications——!  The tragedy and the pity of it...!

* * * * *

Lance travelled North that night with a mind at ease.  Roy had assured him that the moment his ankle permitted he would leave Jaipur and ’give the bee in his bonnet an airing’ elsewhere.  That assurance proved easier to give than to act upon, when the moment came.  The Jaipur Residency had come to seem almost like home.  And the magnet of home drew all that was Eastern in Roy.  It was the British blood in his veins that drove him afield.  Though India was his objective, England was the impelling force.  His true home seemed hundreds of miles away, in more senses than one.  His union with Rajputana—­set with the seal of that sacred and beautiful experience at Chitor—­seemed, in his present mood, the more vital of the two.

And there was Lance up in the Punjab—­a magnet as strong as any, when the masculine element prevailed.  Yet again, some inner irresistible impulse obliged him to break away from them all.  It was one of those inevitable moments when the dual forces within pulled two ways; when he felt envious exceedingly of Lance Desmond’s sane and single-minded attitude towards men and things.  One couldn’t picture Lance a prey to the ignominious sensation that half of him wanted to go one way and half of him another way.  At this juncture, half of himself felt a confounded fool for not going back to the Punjab and enjoying a friendly sociable cold weather among his father’s people.  The other half felt impelled to probe deeper into the complexities of changing India, to confirm and impart his belief that the destinies of England and India were one and indivisible.  After all, India stood where she did to-day by virtue of what England had made her.  He refused to believe that even the insidious disintegrating process of democracy could dissolve—­in a brief fever of unrest—­links forged and welded in the course of a hundred years.

In that case, argued his practical half, why this absurd inner sense of responsibility for great issues over which he could have no shadow of control?  What was the earthly use of it—­this large window in his soul, opening on to the world’s complexities and conflicts; not allowing him to say comfortably, ‘They are not.’  His opal-tinted dreams of interpreting East to West had suffered a change of complexion since Oxford days.  His large vague aspirations of service had narrowed down, inevitably, to a few definite personal issues.  Action involves limitation—­as the picture involves the frame.  Dreams must descend to earth—­or remain unfruitful.  It might be a little, or a great matter, that he had managed to set two human fragments of changing India on the right path—­so far as he could discern it.  The fruits of that modest beginning only the years could reveal....