Certainly Lady Despard still looked amazingly young; still emanated the vital charm she had transmitted to her child.  And Tara at twenty, in soft butter-coloured frock with roses in her hat, was a vision alluring enough to distract any young man from concentration on a punt pole.  Vivid, eager and venturesome, singularly free from the bane of self-consciousness; not least among her graces—­and rare enough to be notable—­was the grace of her chivalrous affection for the older generation.  In Tara’s eyes, girls who patronised their mothers and tolerated their fathers were anathema.  It was a trait certain to impress Roy’s Rajput cousin; and Broome wondered whether Helen was alive to the disturbing possibility; whether, for all her genuine love of the East, she would acquiesce....

Only the other day, it seemed, he and she had sat together among the rocks of the dear old Cap, listening to Nevil’s amazing news.  She it was who had championed his choice of a bride:  and Lilamani had justified her championship to the full.  But then—­Lilamani was one in many thousands; and this affair would be the other way about:—­Tara, the apple of their eye; Tara, with her wild-flower face and her temperament of clear flame——?

How sharply they tugged at his middle-aged heart, these casual and opinionated young things, with their follies and fanaticisms, their Jacob’s ladders hitched perilously to the stars; with their triumphs and failures and disillusions all ahead of them; airily impervious to proffered help and advice from those who would agonise to serve them if they could....

A jarring bump in the small of his back cut short his flagrantly Victorian musings.  Dyan’s punt was the offender; and Dyan himself, clutching the pole that had betrayed him, was almost pitched into the river.

His achievement was greeted by a shout of laughter, and an ironic “Played indeed!” from Cuthbert Gordon—­Broome’s grandson.  Roy, tumbled from some starry dream of his own, flashed out imperiously:  “Look alive, you blithering idiot.  ’Who are you a-shoving’?”

The Rajput’s face darkened; but before he could retort, Tara had risen and stepped swiftly to his side.  Her fingers closed on the pole; and she smiled straight into his clouded eyes.

“Let me, please.  I’m sick of lazing and fearfully keen.  And I can’t allow my Mother to be drownded by anyone but me.  I’d be obliged to murder the other body, which would be awkward—­for us both!”

“Miss Despard—­there is no danger——­” he muttered—­impervious to humour; and—­as if by chance—­one of his hands half covered hers.

“Let go,” she commanded, so low that no one else knew she had spoken; so sternly that Dyan’s fingers unclosed as if they had touched fire.

“Now, don’t fuss.  Go and sit down,” she added, in her lighter vein.  “You’ve done your share.  And you’re jolly grateful to me, really.  But too proud to own it!”