She was standing near the fire in her own sitting-room, wearing the pink dress and sari, her arm still in a sling. Last words, those desperate inanities--buffers between the heart and its own emotion--are difficult things to bring off in any case; peculiarly difficult for these two, with that unreal, yet intensely actual, bond between them; and Roy felt more than grateful to the inspiration that gave him something definite to say.
Instantly her eyes were on it--wondering ... guessing....
"It's a little thing I wrote in Delhi," he said simply. "I couldn't send it to Jeffers. It seemed--to belong to you. So I thought----" He proffered it, feeling absurdly shy of it--and of her.
"Oh--but it is too much!" Holding it with her sling hand, she opened it with the other and devoured it eagerly under his watching eyes. By the changes that flitted across her face, by the tremor of her lips and her hands, as she pressed it to her heart, he knew he could have given her no dearer treasure than that fragment of himself. And because he knew it, he felt tongue-tied; tempted beyond measure to kiss her once again.
If she divined his thought, she kept her lashes lowered and gave no sign.
But before either could break the spell of silence that held them, Thea returned; and their moment--their idyll--was over....
"It's no use trying to keep out of things. The moment they want to put you in--you're in. The moment you're born, you're done for."--HUGH WALPOLE.
The middle of March found Roy back in the Punjab, sharing a ramshackle bungalow with Lance and two of his brother officers; good fellows, both, in their diametrically opposite fashions; but superfluous--from Roy's point of view. When he wanted a quiet 'confab' with Lance, one or both were sure to come strolling in and hang round, jerking out aimless remarks. When he wanted a still quieter 'confab' with his maturing novel, their voices and footsteps echoed too clearly in the verandahs and the scantily furnished rooms. But did he venture to grumble at these minor drawbacks, Lance would declare he was demoralised by floating loose in an Earthly Paradise and becoming a mere appendage to a pencil.
There was a measure of truth in the last. As a matter of fact, after two months of uninterrupted work at Udaipur, Roy had unwarily hinted at a risk of becoming embedded in his too congenial surroundings;--and that careless admission had sealed his fate.