Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning up to save expense and excuse his vacillations. The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished. Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective--a woman's smile at man's unvalorous hesitations. In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but precipitation was essential. On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed. IV The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening. Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face. When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten. Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him. He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids. He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap. "Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?" "Nothing better," he replied. "Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."