"My dearest Girl, you can't think how difficult—how strange it feels writing to you like this. I meant to wait till I came up. But I couldn't write naturally, and I was afraid you mightn't understand.
"I'm coming, after all, sooner than I thought, for my fool of a body has given out, and Collins won't let me hang on, though I feel the work just keeps me going. It must be Kohat first, because of Paul. Now things are calming down, he is getting away to be married. The quietest possible affair, of course; but he's keen I should be best man in place of Lance. And I needn't say how I value the compliment.
"No more trouble here or Amritsar, thank God—and a few courageous men. Martial Law arrangements are being carried through to admiration. The Lahore C.O. seems to get the right side of every one. He has a gift for the personal touch that is everything out here; and in no time the poor deluded beggars in the City were shouting 'Martial Law ki jai' as fervently as ever they shouted for Ghandi and Co.
"One of my fellows said to me: 'Our people don't understand this new talk of "Committee Ki Raj" and "Dyarchy Raj." Too many orders make confusion. But they understand "Hukm Ki raj."'[36] In fact, it's the general opinion that prompt action in the Punjab has fairly well steadied India—for the present at least.
"Well, I won't write more. We'll meet soon; and I don't doubt you'll explain a good deal that still puzzles and hurts me. If I seem changed, you must make allowances. I can't yet see my way in a world empty of Lance. But we must help each other, Rose—not pull two ways. Don't bother to write long explanations. Things will be easier face to face.
"Yours ever,
Roy."
"Yours ever," ... Did he mean that? He certainly meant the rest. Her hands dropped in her lap; and she sat there, staring before her—startled, angry, more profoundly disturbed and unsure of herself than she had felt in all her days. Though Roy had tried to write with moderation, there were sentences that struck at her vanity, her conscience, her heart. Her first overwhelming impulse was to write back at once telling him he need not trouble to come up, as the engagement was off. Accustomed to unquestioning homage, she took criticism badly; also—undeniably—she was jealous of his absorption in Lance. The impulse to dismiss him was mere hurt vanity.
And the queer thing was, that deep down under the vanity and the jealousy, her old feeling for Lance seemed again to be stirring in its sleep.
The love of such a man leaves no light impress on any woman; and Lance had unwittingly achieved two master-strokes calculated to deepen that impress on one of her nature. In the first place, he had fronted squarely the shock of her defection—patently on account of Roy. She could see him now—standing near her mantelpiece, his eyes sombre with passion and pain; no word of reproach or pleading, though there smouldered beneath his silence the fire of his formidable temper. And just because he had neither pleaded nor stormed, she had come perilously near to an ignominious volte-face, from which she had only been saved by something in him, not in herself. If she did not know it then, she knew it now. In the second place, he had died gallantly—again on account of Roy. Snatched utterly out of reach, out of sight, his value was enhanced tenfold; and now, to crown all, came Roy's revelation of his amazing magnanimity....
Strange, what a complicated affair it was, for some people, this simple natural business of getting married. Was it part of the price one had to pay for being beautiful? Half the girls one knew slipped into it with much the same sort of thrill as they slipped into a new frock. But those were mostly the nice plain little things, who subsided gratefully into the first pair of arms held out to them. And probably they had their reward.