Very close to her nestled Tara, a vivid, eager slip of a girl, with wild-rose petals in her cheeks and blue hyacinths in her eyes and sunbeams tangled in her hair, that rippled to her waist in a mass almost too abundant for the small head and elfin face it framed.  In temperament, she suggested a flame rather than a flower, this singularly vital child.  She loved and she hated, she played and she quarrelled with an intensity, a singleness of aim, surprising and a little disquieting in a creature not yet nine.  She was the despair of nurses and had never crossed swords with a governess, which was a merciful escape—­for the governess.  Juvenile fiction and fairy tales she frankly scorned.  Legends of Asgard and Arthur, the virile tales of Rajputana and her warrior chiefs, she drank in as the earth drinks dew.  Roy had a secret weakness for a happy ending—­in his own phrase, “a beautiful marry.”  Tara’s rebel spirit rose to tragedy as a flame leaps to the stars; and there was no lack of high tragedy in the records of Chitor—­Queen of cities—­thrice sacked by Moslem invaders; deserted at last, and left in ruins—­a sacred relic of great days gone by.

This morning Rajputana held the field.  Lilamani, with a thrill in her low voice, was half reading, half telling the adventures of Prithvi Raj (King of the Earth) and his Amazon Princess, Tara—­the Star of Bednore:  verily a star among women for beauty, wisdom, and courage.  Many princes were rivals for her hand; but none would she call “lord” save the man who restored to her father the Kingdom snatched from him by an Afghan marauder.  “On the faith of a Rajput, I will restore it,” said Prithvi Raj.  So, in the faith of a Rajputni, she married him:—­and together, by a daring device, they fulfilled her vow.

Here, indeed, was Roy’s ‘beautiful marry,’ fit prelude for the tale of that heroic pair.  For in life—­Lilamani told them—­marriage is the beginning, not the end.  That is only for fairy tales.

And close against her shoulder, listening entranced, sat the child Tara, with her wild-flower face and the flickering star in her heart—­a creature born out of time into an unromantic world; hands clasped round her upraised knees, her wide eyes gazing past the bluebells and the beech-leaves at some fanciful inner vision of it all; lost in it, as Roy was lost in contemplation of his Mother’s face....

And this unorthodox fashion of imbibing knowledge in the very lap of the Earth Mother, was Lilamani Sinclair’s impracticable idea of ’giving lessons’!  Shades of Aunt Jane!  Of governess and copy-books and rulers!

Happily for all three, Lady Roscoe never desecrated their paradise in the flesh.  She was aware that her very regrettable sister-in-law had ‘queer notions’ and had flatly refused to engage a governess of high qualifications chosen by herself; but the half was not told her.  It never is told to those who condemn on principle what they cannot understand.  At their coming all the little private gateways into the delectable Garden of Intimacy shut with a gentle, decisive click.  So it was with Jane Roscoe, as worthy and unlikeable a woman as ever organised a household to perfection and alienated every member of her family.