Captain Dering had bidden him join the set; bidden him curtly, almost savagely, as the best player available, in answer to a challenge from Muriel Smith to play her, her husband, and the Commissioner. And this challenge had come curtly, also, because Captain Dering was standing beside Laila Bonaventura, to whom he had been giving a cup of coffee. Not because it gave him pleasure, but from sheer determination not to let his mistake in the darkness count for anything. Yet, as the girl's hand took the cup from his, he had remembered with a thrill the gladness, the content it had brought him. Though he refused to acknowledge the fact, the puzzle of this mistake had been his chief thought ever since it occurred, and a smouldering resentment regarding his past relationship with one who was still to him the best and dearest of women was the result. He felt vaguely that she, as well as he, ought to have known that their sentiment, their monopoly, as it were, of friendship, could only mean--what it had meant to him during those few moments of blindness which had, paradoxically, opened his eyes. So he had felt bitter, and she had known it instinctively. If she had ever faced facts, this alone might have opened her eyes also; but she was too good a woman, too helplessly bound by her woman's cult of love, to disassociate it from friendship. So, without bringing a doubt even, the jealous desire of appropriation which draws a line clear and clean as a sword-cut between the two, had risen up in her from the absence of the sympathetic look she had expected from Vincent Dering. So she had challenged him, and so it came to pass that Roshan Khân played badminton with Laila Bonaventura. She took no notice of him beyond a casual inspection of his uniform; still the mere fact of being her equal within the white lines which separated their badminton court from the realities of life seemed a fate. When the game was over, his eyes followed her closely, and he, himself, at a respectful distance; and as he followed her, his desire to speak to her grew as he pondered on his right to do so. After all, as his grandmother had said, she was his cousin. And fate was on his side once more. A well-bred crowding round a table where some photographs of the camp were being shown, brought him so near her that she caught sight of his yellow, silver-laced uniform behind her, and turned quickly. Turned with a look in her big black eyes which dazzled him. It vanished, however, in a second; yet her words, spoken with a faint resentment, made the memory of the look give rise to a swift pulse of angry suspicion. "I thought you were Captain Dering," she said. "Why do you wear the same uniform? I thought natives couldn't be officers."