And Tara——?  Her belated letter, from the wilds of Serbia, had revealed, in every line, that she understood only too well.  For Tara, not long before, had passed through her own ordeal—­the death, in a brilliant air fight, of her second brother Atholl, her devotee and hero from nursery days.  So when Roy’s turn came, her fulness of sympathy and understanding were outstretched like wings to shield him, if might be, from the worst, as she had known it.

For that once, she flung aside the veil of grown-up reserves and wrote straight from her eager passionate heart to the Bracelet-bound Brother, unseen for years, yet linked with her by an imperishable memory; and now linked closer still by a mutual grief.

The comfort to Roy of that spontaneous, Tara-like outpouring had been greater than she knew—­than he could ever let her know.  For the old intimacy had never been quite re-established between them since the day of his tactless juvenile proposal—­for so he saw it now.  They had only met that once, when he was home for Christmas.  On the second occasion, they had missed.  Throughout the War they had corresponded fitfully; but her letters, though affectionate and sisterly, lacked an unseizable something that affected the tone of his response.  He had been rash enough, once, to presume on their special relation.  But he was no longer a boy; and he had his pride.

He wondered sometimes how it would be if they met again.  Would he fall in love with her?  She was supreme.  No one like her.  But he knew now—­as she had instinctively known then—­that his conviction on that score did not amount to being in love.  Conviction must be lit and warmed with the fire of passion.  And you couldn’t very well fall in love across six thousand miles of sea.  Certainly none of the girls he had danced with and ridden with since his arrival in India had affected him that way.  And for him marriage was an important consideration.  Some day he supposed it would confront him as an urgent personal issue.  But there was a tremendous lot to be done first; and girls were kittle cattle.

Unsuspected by him, the ultimate relation with his mother—­while it quickened his need for woman’s enveloping tenderness and sympathy—­held his heart in leash by setting up a standard, to which the modern girl rarely aspired, much less attained.

And now she was gone, in some strange, enthralling way, she held him still.  At rare intervals, she came again to him in dreams; or when he hovered on the verge of sleep.  Dreams, or visions—­they persisted as clearly in memory as any waking act; and unfailingly left a vivid after-sense of having been in touch with her very self.  More and more conviction deepened in him that she still had joy in ’the blossom and fruit of his life’; that even in death she was nearer to him than many living mothers to their sons.