“Yours ever,” ...  Did he mean that?  He certainly meant the rest.  Her hands dropped in her lap; and she sat there, staring before her—­startled, angry, more profoundly disturbed and unsure of herself than she had felt in all her days.  Though Roy had tried to write with moderation, there were sentences that struck at her vanity, her conscience, her heart.  Her first overwhelming impulse was to write back at once telling him he need not trouble to come up, as the engagement was off.  Accustomed to unquestioning homage, she took criticism badly; also—­undeniably—­she was jealous of his absorption in Lance.  The impulse to dismiss him was mere hurt vanity.

And the queer thing was, that deep down under the vanity and the jealousy, her old feeling for Lance seemed again to be stirring in its sleep.

The love of such a man leaves no light impress on any woman; and Lance had unwittingly achieved two master-strokes calculated to deepen that impress on one of her nature.  In the first place, he had fronted squarely the shock of her defection—­patently on account of Roy.  She could see him now—­standing near her mantelpiece, his eyes sombre with passion and pain; no word of reproach or pleading, though there smouldered beneath his silence the fire of his formidable temper.  And just because he had neither pleaded nor stormed, she had come perilously near to an ignominious volte-face, from which she had only been saved by something in him, not in herself.  If she did not know it then, she knew it now.  In the second place, he had died gallantly—­again on account of Roy.  Snatched utterly out of reach, out of sight, his value was enhanced tenfold; and now, to crown all, came Roy’s revelation of his amazing magnanimity....

Strange, what a complicated affair it was, for some people, this simple natural business of getting married.  Was it part of the price one had to pay for being beautiful?  Half the girls one knew slipped into it with much the same sort of thrill as they slipped into a new frock.  But those were mostly the nice plain little things, who subsided gratefully into the first pair of arms held out to them.  And probably they had their reward.

In chastened moods, Rose did not quite care to remember how many times she had succumbed, experimentally, to that supreme temptation.  Good heavens!  What would her precious pair think of her—­if they knew!  At least, she had the grace to feel proud that the tale of her conquests included two such men.

But Lance was gone—­on account of Roy—­where no spell of hers could touch him any more; and Roy—­was he going too ... on account of Lance...?  Not if she could prevent him; and yet ... goodness knew!

The sigh that shivered through her sprang from a deeper source than mere self-pity.

Rattle of rickshaw wheels, puffing and grunting of jhampannis, heralded the return of her mother, who had been out paying a round of preliminary calls.  It took eight stalwart men and a rickshaw of special dimensions to convey her formidable bulk up and down Simla roads; and affectionate friends hinted that the men demanded extra pay for extra weight!