Close beside him lay Prince, his golden retriever; so close that he
could feel the dog's warm body through his thin shirt. At the foot of
the tree, in a nest of pale cushions, sat his mother, in her
apple-blossom sari and a silk dress like the lining of a shell. No
jewels in the morning, except the star that fastened her sari on one
shoulder and a slender gold bangle--never removed--the wedding-ring of
her own land. The boy, mutely adoring, could, in some dim way, feel the
harmony of those pale tones with the olive skin, faintly aglow, and the
delicate arch of her eyebrows poised like outspread wings above the
brown, limpid depths of her eyes. He could not tell that she was still
little more than a girl; barely eight-and-twenty. For him she was
ageless:--protector and playfellow, essence of all that was most real,
yet most magical, in the home that was his world. Unknown to him, the
Eastern mother in her was evoking, already, the Eastern spirit of
worship in her son.

Very close to her nestled Tara, a vivid, eager slip of a girl, with
wild-rose petals in her cheeks and blue hyacinths in her eyes and
sunbeams tangled in her hair, that rippled to her waist in a mass almost
too abundant for the small head and elfin face it framed. In
temperament, she suggested a flame rather than a flower, this singularly
vital child. She loved and she hated, she played and she quarrelled with
an intensity, a singleness of aim, surprising and a little disquieting
in a creature not yet nine. She was the despair of nurses and had never
crossed swords with a governess, which was a merciful escape--for the
governess. Juvenile fiction and fairy tales she frankly scorned. Legends
of Asgard and Arthur, the virile tales of Rajputana and her warrior
chiefs, she drank in as the earth drinks dew. Roy had a secret weakness
for a happy ending--in his own phrase, "a beautiful marry." Tara's rebel
spirit rose to tragedy as a flame leaps to the stars; and there was no