His large vague plans for getting in touch with the thoughtful elements of Calcutta and Bombay had yielded to the stronger magnetism of beauty and art.  Like his father, he hated politics; and Westernised India is nothing if not political.  It was a true instinct that warned him to keep clear of that muddy stream, and render his mite of service to India in the exercise of his individual gift.  That would be in accord with one of his mother’s wise and tender sayings:  (his memory was jewelled with them) “Look always first at your own gifts.  They are sign-posts, pointing the road to your true line of service.”  Could he but immortalise the measure of her spirit that was in him, that were true service to India—­and more than India.  There are men created for action.  There are men created to inspire action.  And the world has equal need of both.

He had things to say on paper that would take him all his time; and Udaipur had metaphorically opened her arms to him.  The Resident and his wife had been more than kind.  He had his books; his cool, lofty rooms in the Guest House; his own private boat on the Lake; and freedom to go his own unfettered way at all hours of the day or night.  There the simmering novel had begun to move with a life of its own; and while that state of being endured, nothing else mattered much in earth or heaven.

For seven weeks he had worked at it without interruption; and for seven weeks he had been happy:  companioned by the vivid creatures of his brain; and, better still, by a quickened undersense of his mother’s vital share in the ‘blossom and fruit of his life.’  The danger of becoming embedded had been no myth:  and at the back of his brain there had lurked a superstitious reluctance to break the spell.

But Lance was Lance:  no one like him.  Moreover, he had known well enough that anticipation of breakers ahead was no fanciful nightmare; but a sane corrective to the ostrich policy of those who had sown the evil seed and were trying to say of the fruit—­’It is not.’  Letters from Dyan, and spasmodic devouring of newspapers, kept him alive to the sinister activities of the larger world outside.  News from Bombay grew steadily more disquieting:—­strikes and riots, fomented by agitators, who lied shamelessly about the nature of the new Bills—­; hostile crowds and insults to Englishwomen.  Dyan more than hinted that if the threatened outbreak were not resolutely crushed at the start, it might prove a far-reaching affair; and Roy had not the slightest desire to find himself ‘packed away in cotton-wool,’ miles from the scene of action.  Clearly Lance wanted him.  He might be useful on the spot.  And that settled the matter.