-either of us."

"No--we couldn't." There was a new gravity in Roy's tone. "As I said,
she probably knows all about it. That's her way. She understandeth one's
thoughts long before." The last in a lower tone--his eyes dwelling on
her portrait above the mantelpiece: the one in the studio window-seat.

And Broome thought: "With all his brains, the man's hardly astir in him
yet; and the boy's still in love with her. This notion may be an
unconscious outlet. A healthy one--if Nevil can be got to see it that
way."

After a perceptible pause, he said quietly: "Remember, Roy, just because
she's unique, she can't be taken as representative. She naturally stands
for India in your eyes. But no country can produce beings of her quality
by the score----"

"I suppose not." Roy reluctantly shifted his gaze. "But she does
represent what's best in the Indian spirit: the spirit that people over
here might take more pains to understand."

"And you are peculiarly well fitted to assist them, I admit--if Father's
willing to bear the cost of your trip. It's a compact between us. The
snare of your A1 dinner shall not have been laid in vain!"

They sat on together for more than an hour. Then Broome departed,
leaving Roy to dream--in a blue mist of tobacco smoke--the opal-tinted
ego-centric dreams of one-and-twenty.

* * * * *

And to-night one dream eclipsed them all.

For years the germ of it had lived in him like a seed in
darkness--growing with him as he grew. All incidents and impressions
that struck deep had served to vitalise it: that early championship of
his mother; her tales of Rajputana; his friendship with Desmond and
Dyan; and, not least, his father's Ramayana pictures in the long gallery
at home, that had seized his imagination in very early days, when their
appeal was simply to his innate sense of colour, and the reiterate
wonder and beauty of his mother's face in those moving scenes from the
story of Sita--India's crown of womanhood....

Then there was the vivid memory of a room in his grandfather's house;
the stately old man, with his deep voice, speaking words that he only
came to understand years after; and the look in his mother's eyes, as
she clapped her hands without sound, in the young fashion he loved....

And Chandranath--another glimpse of India; the ugly side ...And stories
from Tod's 'Rajasthan'--that grim and stirring panorama of romance and
chivalry, of cruelty and cunnin