She found him prone in the hammock:  not even smoking:  staring up into the cool green dome, fretted with graceful convolutions of trunk and branches.  One lightly clenched hand hung over the edge.  Attitude and abstraction alike suggested a listless dejection that sharply caught at her heart.

He started at sight of her.  “Blessed little Mummy—­no hiding from you!”

He flung out his left hand.  She took it and laid it against her cheek:  a form of caress all her own.

“Were you wishing to hide?  I was waiting among the roses, to show you the new sweet-peas.”

“And I never came.  Proper beast I am!  And sprawling here——­” He swung his long legs over the side and stood up, tall and straight—­taller than Nevil—­smiling down at her.  “I wasn’t exactly hiding.  I was shirking—­a little bit.  But now you’ve found me, you won’t escape!”

Pressing down the edge of the hammock, he half lifted her into it and settled her among the cushions, deftly tucking in her silks and muslins.

“Comfy?” he asked, surveying her, with Nevil’s own smile in his eyes.

“Comfy,” she sighed, wishing discreet warnings at the bottom of the sea.  Just to be foolish with him—­the bliss of it!  To chime in with his moods, his enthusiasms, his nonsense—­she asked nothing better of life, when he came home.  “Very clever, Sonling.  But no,”—­she lifted a finger—­“that won’t do.  You are twenty-one.  Too big for the small name now.  So far away up there!”

“If I shot up as high as a lamp-post, my heart would still be down there—­at your feet.”

He said it lightly—­that was the Englishman.  But he said it—­that was the Rajput.  And she knew not which she loved the best.  Strange to love two such opposites with equal fervour.

She blew him a kiss from her finger-tips.  “Very well.  We will not be unkind to the small name and throw him on the rubbish-heap.  But now sit, please—­Sonling.  You have been talking—­you and Dad?  Not any decision?  Is he not wishing you should—­work for India?”

“Mummy, I don’t know.”  He secured a chair and sat down facing her.  “He insists that I’m officially free to kick over the traces, that he’s not the kind of father who ‘thunders vetos from the family hearthrug!’”

Lilamani smiled very tenderly at that so characteristic touch; but she said nothing.  And Roy went on:  “All the same, I gathered that he’s distinctly not keen on my going out there.  So—­what the devil am I to do?  He rubbed it in that I’m full young, and no hurry—­but I feel there’s something else at the back of his mind.”

He paused—­and she could hesitate no longer.

“Yes, Roy—­there is something else——­”

“Then why can’t he speak out?”

“Not to be so impatient,” she rebuked him gently.  “It is because he so beautifully remains—­my lover, he cannot put in words—­any thought that might give——­” She flung out an appealing hand.  “Oh, Roy—­can you not guess the trouble?  He is afraid—­for your marriage——­”