At sight of the young Englishman’s pained frown, he checked his expansive mood.  “To the Sahib I can freely speak the thoughts of my heart; but this is not talk to make a sick man well.  God is merciful.  Before all is lost—­the British Raj may yet arise with power, as in the great days....”

But his talk, if unpalatable, was more tonic than he knew; because Roy’s love for India went deeper than he knew.  The justice of Jiwan Singh’s reproach; the hint at tragic severance of the two countries mingled within him, waked him effectually from semi-torpor; and the process was as painful as the tingling renewal of life in a frozen limb.  By timely courage, on the spot, the threat to India had been staved off:  but it was there still—­sinister, unsleeping, virtually unchecked.

‘Scotched—­not killed.’  The voice of Lance sounded too clearly in Roy’s brain; and the more intimate pain, deadened a little by illness, struck at his heart like a sword....

* * * * *

Within a week, care and feeding and inimitable air, straight from the snowfields, had made him, physically, a new man.  Mentally, it had brought him face to face with actualities, and the staggering question, ‘What next’?

At the back of his mind he had been dreading it, evading it, because it would force him to look deep into his own heart; and to make decisions, when the effort of making them was anathema, beclouded as he was by the depression that still brooded over him like a fog.  The doctor had prescribed a tonic and a whiff of Simla frivolity; but Roy paid no heed.  He knew his malady was mainly of the heart and the spirit.  The true curative touch could only come from some arrowy shaft that would pierce to the core of one or the other.

This morning, by way of reasserting his normal self, he had risen very early with intent to walk out and spend the day at Baghi dak bungalow, ten miles on.  Taking things easily, he believed it could be done.  He would look through his manuscript; try and pick up threads.  Suraj could follow later; and he would ride home over the pass in the cool of the evening.

He set out under a clear heaven, misted with the promise of heat:  the air rather ominously still.  But the thread of a path winding through the dimness and vastness of Narkhanda Forest was ice-cool with the breath of night.  Pines, ilex, and deodars clung miraculously to a hillside of massive rock, that jutted above him at intervals—­threatening, immense; and often, on the khud side, dropped abruptly into nothingness.  When the road curved outward, splashes of sunlight patterned it; and intermittent gaps revealed the flash of snow-peaks, incredibly serene and far.

Normally the scene—­the desolate grandeur of it—­would have intoxicated Roy.  But the stranger he was carrying about with him, and called by his own name, reacted in quite another fashion to the shadowed majesty of looming rocks and forest aisles.  The immensity of it dwarfed one mere suffering man to the dimensions of a pebble on the path.  And the pebble had the advantage of insensibility.  The stillness and chillness made him feel overwhelmingly alone.  A sudden craving for Lance grew almost intolerable....