Impossible to leave so much loveliness, such large drafts of peace and leisure, without a pang; but—­the wrench over—­he was well content to find himself established in this ramshackle bachelor bungalow, back again with Lance and his music—­very much in evidence just now—­and the two superfluous good fellows, whom he liked well enough in homoeopathic doses.  Especially he liked Jack Meredith, cousin of the Desmonds;—­a large and simple soul, gravely absorbed in pursuing balls and tent-pegs and ‘pig’; impervious to feminine lures; equally impervious to the caustic wit of his diametrical opposite, Captain James Barnard, who eased his private envy by christening him ‘Don Juan.’  For Meredith fatally attracted women; and Barnard—­cultured, cynical, Cambridge—­was as fatally susceptible to them as a trout to a May-fly; but, for some unfathomable reason they would not; and in Anglo-India a man could not hide his failures under a bushel.  Lance classified him comprehensively as ‘one of the War lot’; liked him, and was sorry for him, although—­perhaps because—­he was ‘no soldier.’

Roy also liked him; and enjoyed verbal fencing-bouts with him when the mood was on.  Still he would have preferred, beyond measure, the Kohat arrangement, with the Colonel for an unobtrusive third.

But the Colonel, these days, had a bungalow to himself; a bungalow in process of being furnished by no means on bachelor lines.  For the unbelievable had come to pass——!  And the whole affair had been carried through in his own inimitable fashion, without so much as a tell-tale ripple on the surface of things.  Quite unobtrusively, at Kohat, he had made friends with the General’s daughter—­a dark-haired slip of a girl, with the blood of distinguished Frontier soldiers in her veins.  Quite unobtrusively—­during Christmas week—­he had laid his heart and the Regiment at her feet.  Quite unobtrusively, he proposed to marry her in April, when the leave season opened, and carry her off to Kashmir.

“That’s the way it goes with some people,” said Lance, the first time he spoke of it; and Roy fancied he detected a wistful note in his voice.

“That’s the way it’ll go with you, old man,” he had retorted.  “I’m the one that will have to look out for squalls!”

Lance had merely smiled and said nothing:—­the reception he usually accorded to personal remarks.  And, at the moment, Roy thought no more of the matter.

Their first good week of polo and riding and generally fooling round together had quickened his old allegiance to Lance, his newer allegiance to the brotherhood of action.  He possessed no more enviable talent than his many-sided zest for life.

Lance himself seemed in an unusually social mood.  So of course Roy must submit to being bowled round in the new dog-cart and introduced to special friends, in cantonments and Lahore, including the Deputy Commissioner’s wife and good-looking eldest daughter; the best dancer in the station and an extra special friend, he gathered from Lance’s best offhand manner.