Her last words—entirely like herself though they were—surprised him.
"Son of my heart—live for ever," she whispered, laying light hands on his breast. "And when you go into the battle, always keep strongly in your mind that They must not win, because no sacred or beautiful thing would be left clean from their touch. And when you go into the battle always remember—Chitor."
"It is you I shall always remember—looking like this," he answered under his breath. But he never forgot her injunctions; and through years of fighting, he obeyed them to the letter....
That was in April, after Neuve Chapelle, when even optimists admitted that the War might last a year.
At Christmas time he came home on short leave—a changed Roy; his skin browner; his sensitive lips more closely set under the shadow line of his moustache; the fibre of body and spirit hardened, without loss of fineness or flexibility. Livelier on the surface, he was graver, more reticent, underneath—even with her. By the look in his eyes she knew he had seen things that could never be put into words. Some of them she too had seen, through his mind; so close was the spiritual link between them. In that respect at least, he was beautifully, unaffectedly the same....
Nevil was home too, for that wonderful Christmas; and Tara, changed also, in her own vivid way; frank and friendly with Roy; though the grown-up veil between them was seldom lifted now. For the War held them both in its unrelaxing grip; satisfied, in terrible and tremendous fashion, the hidden desire—not uncommon in young things, though concealed like a vice—to suffer for others. Everything else, for the time being, seemed a side issue. Personal affairs could wait....
When it came to letting Nevil and Roy go again, after their brief, beautiful interlude together, Lilámani discovered how those fifteen months of ceaseless anxiety and ceaseless service had shaken her nerve. Gladness of giving could now scarce hold its own against dread of losing; till she felt as if her heart must break under the strain. It did not break, however. It endured—as the hearts of a million mothers and wives have endured in all ages—to breaking-point ... and beyond. The immensity of the whole world's anguish at once crushed and upheld her, making her individual pain seem almost a little thing——
They left her. And the War went on—disastrously, gloriously, stubbornly, inconclusively; would go on, it seemed, to the end of Time. One came to feel as if life free from the shadow of War had never been. As if it would never be again——