But Lance was gone.  Paul, with his bride, had vanished from human ken; Rose, a shattered illusion, gone too.  Better so—­of course; though, intermittently, the man she had roused in him still ached for the sight and feel of her.  She gave a distinct thrill to life:  and, if he could not forgive her, neither could he instantly forget her.

Still less could he forget the significance of the shock she had dealt him on their day of parting.  Patently she loved him, in her passionate, egotistical fashion—­as he had never loved her; patently she had combated her shrinking in defiance of her mother:  and yet...!

Rage as he might, his Rajput pride, and pride in his Rajput heritage, were wounded to the quick.  If all English girls felt that way, he would see them further, before he would propose to another one, or ‘confess’ to his adored Mother, as if she were a family skeleton or a secret vice.  Instantly there sprang the thought of Aruna—­her adoration, her exalted passion; Aruna, whom he might have loved, yet was constrained to put aside because of his English heritage; only to find himself put aside by an English girl on account of his Indian blood.  A pleasant predicament for a man who must needs marry in common duty to his father and himself.

And what of Tara?  Was it possible...?  Could that be the meaning of her final desperate, ‘I can’t do it, Roy—­even for you’!  Was it conceivable—­she who loved his mother to the point of worship?  Still smarting from his recent rebuff, he simply could not tell.  Thea and Lance loved her too; yet, in Lance especially, he had been aware of a tacit tendency to ignore the Indian connection.

The whole complication touched him too nearly, hurt and bewildered him too bitterly, for cool consideration.  He only saw that which had been his pride converted into a reproach, a two-edged sword barring the way to marriage:  and in the bitterness of his heart he found it hard to forgive his parents—­mainly his father—­for putting him in so cruel a position, with no word of warning to soften the blow.

Perhaps people felt differently in England.  If so, India was no place for him.  How blatantly juvenile—­to his clouded, tormented brain—­seemed his arrogant dreams of Oxford days!  What could such as he do for her, in this time of tragic upheaval.  And how could all the Indias he had seen—­not to mention the many he had not seen—­be jumbled together under that one misleading name?  That was the root fallacy of dreamers and ‘reformers.’  They spoke of her as one, when in truth she was many—­bewilderingly many.  The semblance of unity sprang mainly from England’s unparalleled achievement—­her Pax Britannica, that held the scales even between rival chiefs and races and creeds; that had wrought, in miniature, the very inter-racial stability which Europe had vainly fought and striven to achieve.  Yet now, some malign power seemed constraining her, in the name of progress, to undo the work of her own hands....