Yet, beneath her carven tranquillity, heart and spirit were deeply stirred.  For all Nevil’s skill in editing the tale of Roy’s championship, she had read his hidden thoughts as unerringly as she had divined Mrs Bradley’s curiosity and faint hostility beneath the veneer of good manners, not yet imparted to her son.

Helen Despard—­wife of a retired Lieut.-Governor—­had scores of Anglo-Indian friends; but not all of them shared her enthusiasm for India,—­her sympathetic understanding of its peoples.  Lilamani had too soon discovered that the ardent declaration, “I love India,” was apt to mean merely that the speaker loved riding and dancing and sunshine and vast spaces, with ‘the real India’ for a dim effective background.  And by now, she could almost tell at a glance which were the right and which the wrong kind of Anglo-Indian, so far as she and Nevil were concerned.  It was not like Helen to inflict the wrong kind on her; but it had all been Mrs Bradley’s doing.  She had been tactlessly insistent in her demand to see the beautiful old garden and the famous artist-Baronet, who had so boldly flouted tradition.  Helen’s lame excuses had been airily dismissed, and the discourtesy of a point-blank refusal was beyond her.

She had frankly explained matters to her beloved Lilamani as they strolled together on the lawn, while Roy was enlightening Joe on the farther side of the yew hedge.

His championship had moved her more profoundly than she dared let him see without revealing all she knew.  For the same reason, she could not show Nevil her full appreciation of his tact and delicacy.  How useless—­trying to hide his thoughts—­he ought to know by now:  but how beautiful—­how endearing!

That she, who had boldly defied all gods and godlings, all claims of caste and family, should have reaped so rich a harvest——!  For her—­high priestess of the inner life—­that was the miracle of miracles:  scarcely less so to-day than in that crowning hour when she had placed, her first man-child in the arms of her husband—­still, at heart, lord of her being.  For the tale of her inner life might almost be told in two words—­she loved.

Even now—­so many years after—­she thrilled to remember how, in that one magical moment, without nearness or speech or touch, the floating strands of their destinies had become so miraculously entangled, that neither gods nor godlings, nor household despots of East or West, had power to sever them.  From one swift pencil sketch, stolen without leave—­he sitting on the path below, she dreaming on the Hotel balcony above—­had blossomed the twin flower of their love:  the deeper revealing of marriage—­its living texture woven of joy and pain; and the wonder of their after-life together—­a wonder that, to her ardent, sensitive spirit, still seemed new every morning, like the coming of the sun.  A poet in essence, she shared with all true poets that sense of eternal freshness in familiar things that,