His gaze rested absently on the parcel from his father.  What the deuce could it be?  To the imaginative, an unopened parcel never quite loses its intriguing air of mystery.  The shape suggested a picture.  His mother...?

With a luxury of deliberation he cut the strings; removed wrapper after wrapper to the last layer of tissue....

Then he drew a great breath—­and sat spellbound; gazing—­endlessly gazing—­at Tara’s face:—­the wild roses in her cheeks faded a little; the glory of her hair undimmed; the familiar way it rippled back from her low, wide brow; a hint of hidden pain about the sensitive lips and in the hyacinth blue of her eyes.  Only his father could have wrought a vision so appealingly alive.  And the effect on Roy was instantaneous ... overwhelming....

Tara—­dearest and loveliest!  Of course it was her—­always had been, down in the uttermost depths.  The treasure he had been far to seek had blossomed beside him since the beginning of things:  and he, with his eyes always on the horizon, had missed the one incomparable flower at his feet....

Had he missed it?  Had there ever been a chance?  What, precisely, had she meant by her young, vehement refusal of him?  And—­if it were not the dreaded reason—­was there still hope?  Would she ever understand ... ever forgive ... the inglorious episode of Rose?  If, at heart, he could plead the excuse of Adam, he could not plead it to her.

Reverently he took that miracle of a picture between his hands and set it on the broad mantelpiece, that distance might quicken the illusion of life.

Then the spell was on him again.  Her sweetness and light seemed to illumine the unbeautiful room.  Of a truth he knew, now, what it meant to love and be in love with every faculty of soul and body; knew it for a miracle of renewal, the elixir of life.  And—­the light of that knowledge revealed how secondary a part of it was the craving with which he had craved possession of Rose.  Steeped in poetry as he was, there stole into his mind a fragment of Tagore—­’She who had ever remained in the depths of my being, in the twilight of gleams and glimpses ...  I have roamed from country to country, keeping her in the core of my heart.’

All the jangle of jarred nerves and shaken faith; all the confusion of shattered hopes and ideals would resolve itself into coherence at last—­if only ... if only——!

And dropping suddenly from the clouds, he remembered his letters ... her letter.

A sealed envelope had fallen unheeded from his father’s parcel:  but it was hers he seized—­and half hesitated to open.  What if she were announcing her own engagement to some infernal fellow at home?  There must be scores and scores of them....

His hand was not quite steady as he unfolded the two sheets that bore his father’s crest and the home stamp, ‘Bramleigh Beeches.’

     “My Dear Roy (he read),