He felt her shrink from the direct question.

"Why press the point, Roy? It needn't make any real difference--need it--between you and me?"

Her counter-question was still more direct, more searching.

"Perhaps not--now," he said. "It might ... make a lot ...

afterwards----"

At that critical juncture their talk was interrupted by a peon with a note that required immediate attention: and Roy, left alone, felt increasingly disillusioned and dismayed.

Later on, to his relief, Rose suggested a ride. She seemed suddenly in a more elusive mood than he had experienced since their engagement. She did not refer again to his novel, or to the th.o.r.n.y topic of India; and their parting embrace was chilled by a shadow of constraint.

"_How_ would it be--afterwards?" he wondered, riding back to the Club, at a foot's pace, feeling tired and feverish and gravely puzzled as to whether it might not--on all counts--be the greater wrong to make a fetish of a bond so rashly forged.

To-day, very distinctly he was aware of the inner tug he had been trying to ignore. And to-day it was more imperative; less easily stilled. Could it be ... veritably, his mother, trying to reach him--and failing, for the first time?

That thought prompted the test question--if _she_ were alive, how would he feel about bringing Rose home as daughter-in-law, as mother of her grandson ... the gift of gifts? If she were alive, could Rose herself have faced the conjunction? And to him she was still verily alive--or had been, till his infatuate pa.s.sion had blinded him to everything but one face, one form, one desire.

That night there came to him--on the verge of sleep--the old thrilling sensation that she was there--yearning to him across an impa.s.sable barrier. And this time he knew--with a bitter certainty--that the barrier was within himself. Every nerve in him craved--as he had not craved this long while--the unmistakable _sense_ of her that seemed gone past recall. Desperately, he strained every faculty to penetrate the resistant medium that withheld her from him--in vain.

Wearied out, with disappointment and futile effort, he fell asleep--praying for a dream visitation to revive his shaken faith. None came; and conviction seized him that none would come, until....

One could not, simultaneously, live on intimate terms with earth and heaven. And Rose was earth in its most alluring guise. More: she had awakened in him sensations and needs that, at the moment, she alone could satisfy. But if it amounted to a choice; for him, there could be no question....

Next day and the day after, a sharp return of fever kept him in bed: and a touch of his father in him tempted him to write, sooner than face the strain of a final scene. But moral cowardice was not among his failings; also unquestionably--if irrationally--he wanted to see her, to hold her in his arms once again....

On the third morning he sent her a note saying he was better; he would be round for tea; and received a verbal answer. Miss Sahib sent her salaam. She would be at home.

So, about half-past three, he rode out to the house on Elysium Hill, wondering how--and, at moments, whether--he was going to pull it through....

Her smile of welcome almost unmanned him. He simply did not feel fit for the strain. It would be so much easier and more restful to yield to her spell.

"I'm so sorry. Idiotic of me," was all he said; and went forward to take her in his arms.

But she, without a word, laid both hands on him, holding him back.

"_Rose!_ What's the matter?" he cried, genuinely upset. Nothing undermines a resolve like finding it forestalled.

"Simply--it's all over. We're beaten, Roy," she said in a queer, repressed voice. "We can't go on with this. And--you know it."

"But--darling!" He took her by the arms.

"No ... _no_!" The pa.s.sionate protest was addressed to herself as much as to him. "Listen, Roy. I've never hated saying anything more--but it's true. You said, last time,--'Why pretend?' And that struck home. I knew I had been pretending hard--because I wanted to--for more than a week.

You made me realise ... one couldn't go on at it all one's married life.--But, my dear, what a wretch I am! You're not fit...."

"Oh, I'm just wobbly ... stupid," he muttered, half dazed, as she pressed him down into a corner of the Chesterfield.

"Poor old boy. When you've had some tea, you'll be able to face things."

He said nothing; merely leaned back against the cushion and closed his eyes--part of him rebelling furiously against her quiet yet summary proceedings--while she attended to the sputtering kettle.

How prosaic, after all, are even the great moments of life! They had been ardent lovers. They had come to the parting of the ways. But a kettle on the boil would wait for no man; and, till the body was served, the troubles of the heart must stand aside.

She drew the table nearer to him; carefully poured out tea; carefully avoided his eyes. And--in the intervals between her mechanical occupations--she told him as much of the truth as she felt he could bear to hear, or she to speak. Among other things, unavoidably, she explained how--and through whom--her mother had come to know about their reservation----

"_That_ young sweep!" Roy muttered, so suddenly half-alert and fierce that amused tenderness tripped up her studied composure.

"You'd go for him now, just the same, I believe!"

"I would--and a bit extra. Because--of you."

She sighed. "Oh yes, it was a _mauvais quart d'heure_ of the first order. And coming on the top of your crushing letter----"

He captured her hand. Their eyes met--and softened.

"No, Roy," she said, gently but inexorably releasing her fingers. "We've got to keep our heads to-day, somehow."

"Has yours so completely taken command of affairs?"

"I'm afraid--it has."

"Yet--you stood up to your mother?"

"Oh, I did--as I've never done yet. But afterwards I realised--it was only skin deep. She said ... things I can't repeat; but equally ... I can't forget; things about ... possible children...."

The blood flamed in Roy's sallow face. "Confound her! What does _she_ know about possible children?"

"More than I do, I suppose," Rose admitted, with a pathetic half smile.

"Anyway, after that, she refused to countenance the engagement--the wedding----"

Roy sat suddenly forward, scorn and anger in his eyes.

"_Refused_----! After the infernal fuss she made over me, because my father happened to have a t.i.tle and a garden. And now----" his hand closed on the edge of the table. "I'm considered a pariah--am I?--simply on account of my lovely little mother--the guardian angel of us all!"

His blaze of wrath, his low pa.s.sionate tone, startled her to silence. He had spoken so seldom of his mother since the first occasion, that--although she knew--she had far from plumbed the height and depth of his worship. And instinctively she thought, 'I should have been jealous into the bargain.'

But Roy had room just then for one consideration only.

"Here have I been coming to her house on sufferance ... polluting her precious drawing-room, while she's been avoiding me as if I was a leper, all because I'm the son of a sainted woman, whose shoe she wouldn't have been worthy ... oh, I beg your pardon----" He checked himself sharply.

"After all--she's _your_ mother."

Rose felt her cheeks growing uncomfortably warm. "I did warn you, in Lah.o.r.e, some people felt ... that way."

"Well, I never dreamed they would _behave_ that way. It's not as if I'd been born and reared in India and might claim relations in her compound."

"My dear--one can't make her see the difference," Rose urged desperately.