Roy found her more than good-looking; beautiful, almost, with her twofold grace of carriage and feature and her low-toned harmony of colouring:—­ivory-white skin, ash-blond hair and hazel eyes, clear as a Highland river; the pupils abnormally large, the short thick lashes very black, like a smudge round her lids.  She was tall, in fine, and carried her beauty like a brimming chalice; very completely mistress of herself; and very completely detached from her florid, effusive, worldly-wise mother.  Unquestionably, a young woman to be reckoned with.

But Roy did not feel disposed, just then, to reckon seriously with any young woman, however alluring.  The memory of Aruna—­the exquisite remoteness from everyday life of their whole relation—­did not easily fade.  And the creatures of his brain were still clamant, in spite of broken threads and drastic change of surroundings.  Lance had presented him with a spacious writing-table; and most days he would stick to it for hours, sooner than drive out in pursuit of tennis or afternoon dancing in Lahore.

He was sitting at it now; flinging down a dramatic episode, roughly, rapidly, as it came.  The polished surface was strewn with an untidy array of papers; the only ornaments a bit of old brass-work and two ivory elephants; a photograph of his father and a large one of his mother taken from the portrait at Jaipur.  The table was set almost at right angles to his open door, and the chick rolled up.  He had a weakness for being able to ‘see out,’ if it was only the corner of a barren ‘compound’ and a few dusty oleanders.  He had forgotten the others; forgotten the time.  All he asked, while the spate lasted, was to be left alone....

He almost jumped when the latch clicked behind him and Lance strolled in, faultlessly attired in the latest suit from home; a golden-brown tie and a silk handkerchief, the same shade, emerging from his breast pocket.  By nature, Lance was no dandy; but Roy had not failed to note that he was apt to be scrupulously well turned out on certain occasions.  And, at sight of him, he promptly ‘remembered he had forgotten’ the very particular nature of to-day’s occasion:  the marriage of Miss Gladys Elton—­step-sister of Rose—­to a rising civilian some eighteen years older than his bride.  It was an open secret, in the station, that the wedding was Mrs Elton’s private and personal triumph, that she, not her unassuming daughter, was the acknowledged heroine of the day.

“Not ready yet—­you unmitigated slacker?” Lance exclaimed with an impatient frown.  “Buck up.  Time we were moving.”

“Awfully sorry.  I clean forgot.”  Roy’s tone was not conspicuously penitent.

“Tell us another!  The whole Mess was talking of it at tiffin.”

“I’m afraid I’d forgotten all about tiffin.”

It was so patently the truth that Lance looked mollified.  “You and your confounded novel!  Now then—­double.  I don’t want to be glaringly late.”