The blood stirred visibly under her pallor.  “It was not an infliction.  Your writing’s wonderful.  Quite uncanny—­the way you get inside people and things.  If there’s more—­go on.”

“There’s a lot more.  But I’m not going on—­even at her Majesty’s express command!—­Look here, Rose ... let be.”  He suddenly changed his tone.  “I can feel how it bothers you.  So—­why pretend...?”

She looked down; twisting her opal ring, making the delicate colours flash and change.

“It’s a pity—­isn’t it?”—­she seemed to muse aloud—­“that more than half of life is made up of pretending.  It becomes rather a delicate problem—­fixing boundary lines.  I do admire your gift, Roy.  And you’re so intensely human.  But I confess, I—­I am jerked by parts of your theme.  Doesn’t all this animosity and open vilification affect your own feeling about—­things, the least bit?”

“Yes.  It does.  Only—­not in your way.  It makes me unhappy, because the real India—­snowed under with specious talk and bitter invective—­has less chance now than ever of being understood by those who can’t see below the surface.”

“Me—­for instance?”

He sighed.  “Oh, scores and scores of you, here and at Home.  And scores of others, who have far less excuse.  That’s why one feels bound to do what one can....”

His thoughts on that score went too deep for utterance.

But Rose was engaged in her own purely personal deliberations.

“You might want to come out again ... afterwards?”

“Yes—­I should hope to.  Besides ... there are my cousins....”

“Indian ones——?”

“Yes.  Very clever.  Very charming.  Rose ... you’ve been six years in
India.  Have you ever met, in a friendly way, a cultivated, well-born
Indian—­man or woman?”

“N-no.  Not worth mentioning.”

“And ... you haven’t wanted to?”

He felt her shrink from the direct question.

“Why press the point, Roy?  It needn’t make any real difference—­need it—­between you and me?”

Her counter-question was still more direct, more searching.

“Perhaps not—­now,” he said.  “It might ... make a lot ... afterwards——­”

At that critical juncture their talk was interrupted by a peon with a note that required immediate attention:  and Roy, left alone, felt increasingly disillusioned and dismayed.

Later on, to his relief, Rose suggested a ride.  She seemed suddenly in a more elusive mood than he had experienced since their engagement.  She did not refer again to his novel, or to the thorny topic of India; and their parting embrace was chilled by a shadow of constraint.

“How would it be—­afterwards?” he wondered, riding back to the Club, at a foot’s pace, feeling tired and feverish and gravely puzzled as to whether it might not—­on all counts—­be the greater wrong to make a fetish of a bond so rashly forged.