Dinner was over.  They were sitting out on the lawn, he and his father; a small table beside them, with glass coffee-machine and chocolates in a silver dish; the smoke of their cigars hovering, drifting, unstirred by any breeze.  No Terry at his feet.  The faithful creature—­vision of abject misery—­had been carried off to eat his heart out in quarantine.  Tangled among tree-tops hung the ghost of a moon, almost full.  Somewhere, in the far quiet of the shrubberies, a nightingale was communing with its own heart in liquid undertones; and in Roy’s heart there dwelt an iridescence of peace and pain and longing shot through with hope——­

That very morning, at an unearthly hour, he had landed in England, after an absence of three and a half years:  and precisely what that means in the way of complex emotions, only they know who have been there.  The purgatorial journey had eclipsed expectation.  Between recurrent fever and sea-sickness, there had been days when it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach Home at all.  But a wiry constitution and the will to live had triumphed:  and, in spite of the early hour, his father had not failed to be on the quay.

The first sight of him had given Roy a shock for which—­in spite of Tara’s letter—­he was unprepared.  This was not the father he remembered—­humorous, unruffled, perennially young; but a man so changed and tired-looking that he seemed almost a stranger, with his empty coat-sleeve and hair touched with silver at the temples.

The actual moment of meeting had been difficult; the joy of it so deeply tinged with pain that they had clung desperately to surface commonplaces, because they were Englishmen, and could not relieve the inner stress by falling on one another’s necks.

And there had been a secret pang (for which Roy sharply reproached himself) that Tara was not there too.  Idiotic to expect it, when he knew Sir James had gone to Scotland for fishing.  But to be idiotic is the lover’s privilege; and his not phenomenal gift of patience had been unduly strained by the letter awaiting him at Port Said.

They were coming back to-night; but he would not see her till to-morrow....

In his pocket reposed a brief Tara-like note, bidding her ’faithful Knight of the Bracelet’ welcome Home.  Vainly he delved between the lines of her sisterly affection.  Nothing could still the doubt that consumed him, but contact with her hands, her eyes.

For that, and other reasons, the difficult meeting had been followed by a difficult day.  They had wandered through the house and garden, very carefully veiling their emotions.  They had lounged and smoked in the studio, looking through his father’s latest pictures.  They had talked of the family.  Jeffers would be down to-morrow night, for the week-end; Tiny on Tuesday with the precious Baby; Jerry, distinctly coming round, and eager to see Roy.  Even Aunt Jane sounded a shade keen.  And he, undeserving, had scarcely expected them to ‘turn a hair.’  Then they discussed the Indian situation; and Roy—­forgetting to be shy—­raged at finding how little those at Home had been allowed to realise, to understand.