All his thronging thoughts were tinged with the gloom of his unhopeful mood; and his body sagged with his sagging spirit.  Before he had walked four miles, his legs refused to carry him any farther.

He had emerged into the open, into full view of the vastness beyond.  Naked rock and stone, jewelled with moss and young green, fell straight from the path’s edge; and one ragged pine, springing from a group of boulders, was roughly stencilled on blue distances empurpled with shadows of thunderous cloud.

A flattened boulder proved irresistible; and Roy sat down, leaning his head against the trunk, sniffing luxuriously—­whiffs of resin and sun-warmed pine-needles.  Oh, to be at home, in his own beech-wood!  But the journey in this weather would be purgatorial.  Meantime, there was his walk; and he decided, prosaically, to fortify himself with a slab of chocolate.  Instead—­still more prosaically, he fell sound asleep....

But sleep, in an unnatural position, begets dreams.  And Roy dreamed of Lance; of that last awful day when he raved incessantly of Rose.  But in the dream he was conscious; and before his distracted gaze Roy held Rose in his arms; craving her, yet hating her; because she clung to him, heedless of entreaties from Lance, and would not be shaken off....

In a frantic effort to free himself, he woke—­with the anguish of his loss fresh upon him—­to find the sky heavily overcast, the breathlessness of imminent storm in the air.  Away to the North there were blue spaces, sun-splashed leagues of snow.  But from the South and West rolled up the big battalions—­heralds of the monsoon.

He concluded apathetically that Baghi was ‘off.’  He was in for a drenching.  Lucky he had brought his burberry....

Yet he did not stir.  A ton weight seemed to hang on his limbs, his spirit, his heart.  He simply sat there, in a carven stillness, staring down, down, into abysmal depths....

And startlingly, sharply, the temptation assailed him.  The tug of it was almost physical....  How simple to yield—­to cut his many tangles at one stroke!

In that jaundiced moment he saw himself a failure foreordained; debarred from marriage by evils supposed to spring from the dual strain in him; his cherished hopes of closer union between the two countries he loved threatened with shipwreck by an England complacently experimental, an India at war with the British connection and with her many selves.  He seemed fated to bring unhappiness on those he cared for—­Aruna, Lance, even Rose.  And what of his father—­if he failed to marry?  He hadn’t even the grit to finish his wretched novel....

He rose at last, mechanically, and moved forward to the unrailed edge of all things.  The magnetism of the depths drew him.  The fatalistic strain in his blood drew him....

He stood—­though he did not know it—­as his mother had once stood, hovering on the verge; his own life—­that she bore within her—­hanging in the balance.  From the fatal tilt, she had been saved by the voice of her husband—­the voice of the West.  And now, at Roy’s critical moment, it was the voice of the West—­of Lance—­that sounded in his brain:  “Don’t fret your heart out, Roy.  Carry on.”