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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path of a Star, by Mrs. Everard Cotes
+(#3 in our series by Mrs. Everard Cotes)
+
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+Title: The Path of a Star
+
+Author: Mrs. Everard Cotes
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5102]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 28, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH OF A STAR ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Don Lainson.
+
+
+
+
+THE PATH OF A STAR
+
+
+by
+
+
+MRS. EVERARD COTES
+
+(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)
+
+
+1899
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+She pushed the portiere aside with a curved hand and gracefully
+separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed
+it after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little
+forward, eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew
+precisely who was there.  You would have been aware at once that
+she was an actress.  She entered the room with a little stride and
+then crossed it quickly, the train of her morning gown--it cried
+out of luxury with the cheapest voice--taking folds of great
+audacity as she bent her face in its loose mass of hair over Laura
+Filbert, sitting on the edge of a bamboo sofa, and said--
+
+"You poor thing!  Oh, you POOR thing!"
+
+She took Laura's hand as she spoke, and tried to keep it; but the
+hand was neutral, and she let it go.  "It is a hand," she said to
+herself, in one of those quick reflections that so often visited
+her ready-made, "that turns the merely inquiring mind away.
+Nothing but feeling could hold it."
+
+Miss Filbert made the conventional effort to rise, but it came to
+nothing, or to a mere embarrassed accent of their greeting.  Then
+her voice showed this feeling to be superficial, made nothing of
+it, pushed it to one side.
+
+"I suppose you cannot see the foolishness of your pity," she said.
+"Oh Miss Howe, I am happier than you are--much happier."  Her bare
+feet, as she spoke, nestled into the coarse Mirzapore rug on the
+floor, and her eye lingered approvingly upon an Owari vase three
+feet high, and thick with the gilded landscape of Japan, which
+stood near it, in the cheap magnificence of the room.
+
+Hilda smiled.  Her smile acquiesced in the world she had found,
+acquiesced, with the gladness of an explorer, in Laura Filbert as a
+feature of it.
+
+"Don't be too sure," she cried; "I am very happy.  It is such a
+pleasure to see you."
+
+Her gaze embraced Miss Filbert as a person, and Miss Filbert as a
+pictorial fact, but that was because she could not help it.  Her
+eyes were really engaged only with the latter Miss Filbert.
+
+"Much happier than you are," Laura repeated, slowly moving her head
+from side to side as if to negative contradiction in advance.  She
+smiled too; it was as if she had remembered a former habit, from
+politeness.
+
+"Of course you are--of course!" Miss Howe acknowledged.  The words
+were mellow and vibrant; her voice seemed to dwell upon them with a
+kind of rich affection.  Her face covered itself with serious
+sweetness.  "I can imagine the beatitudes you feel--by your
+clothes."
+
+The girl drew her feet under her, and her hand went up to the only
+semi-conventional item of her attire.  It was a brooch that
+exclaimed in silver letters "Glory to His Name!"  "It is the dress
+of the Army in this country," she said; "I would not change it for
+the wardrobe of a queen."
+
+"That's just what I mean."  Miss Howe leaned back in her chair with
+her head among its cushions, and sent her words fluently across the
+room, straight and level with the glance from between her half-
+closed eyelids.  A fine sensuous appreciation of the indolence it
+was possible to enjoy in the East clung about her.  "To live on a
+plane that lifts you up like that--so that you can defy all
+criticism and all convention, and go about the streets like a mark
+of exclamation at the selfishness of the world--there must be
+something very consummate in it or you couldn't go on.  At least I
+couldn't."
+
+"I suppose I do look odd to you."  Her voice took a curious, soft,
+uplifted note.  "I wear three garments only--the garments of my
+sisters who plant the young shoots in the rice-fields, and carry
+bricks for the building of rich men's houses, and gather the dung
+of the roadways to burn for fuel.  If the Army is to conquer India
+it must march bare-footed and bare-headed all the way.  All the
+way," Laura repeated, with a tremor of musical sadness.  Her eyes
+were fixed in appeal upon the other woman's.  "And if the sun beats
+down upon my uncovered head, I think, 'It struck more fiercely upon
+Calvary'; and if the way is sharp to my unshod feet, I say, 'At
+least I have no cross to bear.'"  The last words seemed almost a
+chant, and her voice glided from them into singing--
+
+
+     "The blessed Saviour died for me,
+      On the cross!  On the cross!
+      He bore my sins at Calvary,
+      On the rugged cross!"
+
+
+She sang softly, her body thrust a little forward in a tender
+swaying--
+
+
+     "Behold His hands and feet and side,
+      The crown of thorns, the crimson tide,
+      'Forgive them, Father!' loud He cried,
+      On the rugged cross!"
+
+
+"Oh, thank you!" Miss Howe exclaimed.  Then she murmured again,
+"That's just what I mean."
+
+A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross
+the moon.  She regarded Hilda from behind it, with penetrant
+anxiety.  "Did you really enjoy that hymn?" she asked.
+
+"Indeed I did."
+
+"Then, dear Miss Howe, I think you cannot be very far from the
+Kingdom."
+
+"I?  Oh, I have my part in a kingdom."  Her voice caressed the
+idea.  "And the curious thing is that we are all aristocrats who
+belong to it.  Not the vulgar kind, you understand--but no, you
+don't understand.  You'll have to take my word for it."  Miss
+Howe's eyes sought a red hibiscus flower that looked in at the
+window half drowned in sunlight, and the smile in them deepened.
+
+"Is it the Kingdom of God and His righteousness?"  Laura Filbert's
+clear glance was disturbed by a ray of curiosity, but the
+inflexible quality of her tone more than counterbalanced this.
+
+"There's nothing about it in the Bible, if that's what you mean.
+And yet I think the men who wrote 'The time of the singing of birds
+has come,' and 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,' must have
+belonged to it."  She paused, with an odd look of discomfiture.
+"But one shouldn't talk about things like that--it takes the bloom
+off.  Don't you feel that way about your privileges now and then?
+Don't they look rather dusty and battered to you after a day's
+exposure in Bow Bazar?"
+
+There came a light crunch of wheels on the red soorkee drive
+outside, and a switch past the bunch of sword-ferns that grew
+beside the door.  The muffled crescendo of steps on the stair and
+the sound of an inquiry penetrated from beyond the portiere, and
+without further preliminary Duff Lindsay came into the room.
+
+"Do I interrupt a rehearsal?" he asked; but there was nothing in
+the way he walked across the room to Hilda Howe to suggest that the
+idea abashed him.  For her part she rose and made one short step to
+meet him, and then received him as it were with both hands and all
+her heart.
+
+"How ridiculous you are!" she cried.  "Of course not.  And let me
+tell you it is very nice of you to come this very first day when
+one was dying to be welcomed.  Miss Filbert came too, and we have
+been talking about our respective walks in life.  Let me introduce
+you.  Miss Filbert--Captain Filbert, of the Salvation Army--Mr.
+Duff Lindsay of Calcutta."
+
+She watched with interest the gravity with which they bowed, and
+the difference in it: his the simple formality of his class,
+Laura's a repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he
+looked, although any Bond Street tailor would have impeached his
+waistcoat, and one shabby glove had manifestly never been on.  Yet
+Miss Filbert's first words seemed to show a slight unbending.
+"Won't you sit there?" she said, indicating the sofa corner she had
+been occupying.  "You get the glare from the window where you are."
+It was virtually a command, delivered with a complete air of
+dignity and authority; and Lindsay, in some confusion, found
+himself obeying.  "Oh, thank you, thank you," he said.  "One
+doesn't really mind in the least.  Do you--do you object to it?
+Shall I close the shutters?"
+
+"If you do," said Miss Howe delightedly, "we shall not be able to
+see."
+
+"Neither we should," he assented; "the others are closed already.
+Very badly built these Calcutta houses, aren't they?  Have you been
+long in India, Miss--Captain Filbert?"
+
+"I served a year up-country, and then fell ill and had to go home
+on furlough.  The native food didn't suit me.  I am stationed in
+Calcutta now, but I have only just come."
+
+"Pleasant time of the year to arrive," Mr. Lindsay remarked.
+
+"Yes; but we are not particular about that.  We love all the times
+and the seasons, since every one brings its appointed opportunity.
+Last year, in Mugridabad, there were more souls saved in June than
+in any other month."
+
+"Really?" asked Mr. Lindsay; but he was not looking at her with
+those speculations.  The light had come back upon her face.
+
+"I will say good-bye now," said Captain Filbert.  "I have a meeting
+at half-past five.  Shall we have a word of prayer before I go?"
+
+She plainly looked for immediate acquiescence; but Miss Howe said,
+"Another time, dear."
+
+"Oh, why not?" exclaimed Duff Lindsay.  Hilda put the semblance of
+a rebuke into her glance at him, and said, "Certainly not."
+
+"Oh," Captain Filbert cried, "don't think you can escape that way!
+I will pray for you long and late to-night, and ask my lieutenant
+to do so too.  Don't harden your heart, Miss Howe--the Lord is
+waiting to be compassionate."
+
+The two were silent, and Laura walked toward the door.  Just where
+the sun slanted into the room and made leaf-patterns on the floor
+she turned and stood for an instant in the full tide of it; and it
+set all the loose tendrils of her pale yellow hair in a little
+flame, and gave the folds of the flesh-coloured sari that fell over
+her shoulder the texture of draperies so often depicted as
+celestial.  The sun sought into her face, revealing nothing but
+great purity of line and a clear pallor except where below the wide
+light blue eyes two ethereal shadows brushed themselves.  Under the
+intentness of their gaze she made as if she would pass out without
+speaking; and the tender curves of her limbs, as she wavered, could
+not have been matched out of mediaeval stained glass.  But her
+courage, or her conviction, came back to her at the door, and she
+raised her hand and pointed at Hilda.
+
+"She's got a soul worth saving."
+
+Then the portiere fell behind her, and nothing was said in the room
+until the pad of her bare feet had ceased upon the stair.
+
+"She came out in the Bengal with us," Hilda told him--this is not a
+special instance of it, but she could always gratify Duff Lindsay
+in advance--"and she was desperately seedy, poor girl.  I looked
+after her a little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got
+me on her mind.  And as the two hundred and eighty million
+benighted souls of India are her continual concern, I seem a
+superfluity.  To think of being the two hundred and eighty
+millionth and first oppresses one."
+
+Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.
+
+"You weren't at that end of the ship?" he demanded.
+
+"Of course I was--we all were.  And some of us--little Miss Stace,
+for instance--thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and
+sardines for tea every night for a whole month.  And, after Suez,
+ices for dinner on Sundays.  It was luxury."
+
+Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache.  "I don't call it fair
+or friendly," he said, "when you know how easily it could have been
+arranged.  Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told
+you that the second-class saloon was no place for you.  For YOU!"
+
+Plainly she did not intend to argue the point.  She poised her chin
+in her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help
+seeing, as he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful.  But
+this had been so long acknowledged between them that she could
+hardly have been conscious that she was insisting on it afresh.
+Then by the time he might have thought her launched upon a
+different meditation, her mind swept back to his protest, like a
+whimsical bird.
+
+"I didn't want to extract anything from the mercantile community of
+Calcutta in advance," she said.  "It would be most unbusinesslike.
+Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself,
+as leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season.
+Then I think," she said with defiance, "that I shall avoid you."
+
+"And pray why?"
+
+"Because you would put too much in.  According to your last letters
+you are getting beastly rich.  You would take all the tragedy out
+of the situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque."
+
+"I don't know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the
+way of your experiences," Lindsay said.  She retorted, "Oh yes, you
+do"; and they regarded each other through an instant's silence with
+visible good-fellowship.
+
+"A reasonably strong company this time?" Lindsay asked.
+
+"Thank you.  'Company' is gratifying.  For a month we have been a
+'troupe'--in the first-class end.  Fairish.  Bad to middling.
+Fifteen of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can
+please with light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon
+done on mirrors with a thousand candlepower.  Bradley and I will
+have to do most of the serious work.  But I have improved--oh, a
+lot.  You wouldn't know my Lady Whippleton."
+
+It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
+appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.
+
+"Then Bradley is here too?" he remarked.
+
+"Oh yes," she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face.
+"But it is much better than it was, really.  He is hardly ever
+troublesome now.  He understands.  And he teaches me a great deal
+more than I can tell you.  You know," she asserted, with the effect
+of taking an independent view, "as an artist he has my unqualified
+respect."
+
+"You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when
+they are not women," Duff said.  "I don't believe their behaviour
+is a bit more affected by their artistry than it would be by a
+knowledge of the higher mathematics."
+
+She turned indignant eyes on him.  "Fancy YOUR saying that!  Fancy
+your having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry!
+At what Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?" she cried
+derisively.  "Well, it shows that one can't trust one's best friend
+loose among the conventions!"
+
+He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such
+matters were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when
+she added, with apparent inconsistency and real dejection, "It IS
+a hideous bore."
+
+Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it
+aside he felt that she was generous.  Yet something in him--perhaps
+the primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch
+impulse to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to
+say, "He gives up a good deal, doesn't he, for his present
+gratification?"
+
+"He gives up everything!  That is the disgusting part of it.
+Leander Morris offered him--  But why should I tell you?  It's
+humiliating enough in the very back of one's mind."
+
+"He is a clever fellow, no doubt."
+
+"Not too clever to act with me!  Oh, we go beautifully--we melt, we
+run together.  He has given me some essential things, and now I can
+give them back to him.  I begin to think that is what keeps him
+now.  It must be awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in--
+in anybody, and watch it grow."
+
+"Doubtless," said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her
+eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing.  Although she
+knew his very moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with
+his eyes on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it
+with a cynical clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little
+hardness came about her mouth.  "Well," he said, visibly detaching
+himself from the matter, "it's a satisfaction to have you back.  I
+have been doing nothing, literally, since you went away, but making
+money and playing tennis.  Existence, as I look back upon it, is
+connoted by a varying margin of profit and a vast sward."
+
+She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely,
+considering the advisability of returning.  "It's a pity you can't
+act," she said; "then you could come away and let it all go."
+
+Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed.  "How simple
+life is to you!" he said.  "But anyway I couldn't act."
+
+"Oh no, you couldn't, you couldn't!  You are too intensely
+absorbent, you are too rigidly individual.  The flame in you would
+never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else--
+any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called
+imaginary.  Never!"
+
+It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was:  "I wish you
+would go on.  You can't think how gratifying it is--after the
+tennis."
+
+"If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable."
+
+"Oh then, stop.  We can't quarrel yet--I've hardly seen you.  Are
+you comfortable here?  Would you like some French novels?"
+
+"Yes, thank you.  Yes, please!"  She grew before him into a light
+and conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of
+speech.  He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the
+spring she had detached herself from, and after failing for a
+quarter of an hour he got up to go.
+
+"I shan't bother you again before Saturday," he said; "I know what
+a week it will be at the theatre.  Remember you are to give the man
+his orders about the brougham.  I can get on perfectly with the
+cart.  Good-bye!  Calcutta is waiting for you."
+
+"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe.  "It is waiting with
+yawns and much whisky and soda."  She gave him a stately inclination
+with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his
+heart in a burlesque of it.  At the door he remembered something,
+and turned.  He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had
+stood, but the sun was gone.  "You might tell me more about your
+friend of the altruistic army," he said.
+
+"You saw, you heard, you know."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for
+yourself, at the Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street--you man!"
+
+Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way
+down the stairs her voice appealed to him over the banisters.
+
+"You might as well forget that.  I didn't particularly mean it."
+
+"I know you didn't," he returned.  "You woman!  But you yourself--
+you're not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"
+
+Hilda leaned upon the banisters, her arms dropping over from the
+elbows.  "I suppose I may look at her," she said; and her smile
+glowed down upon him.
+
+"Do you think it really rewards attention?--the type, I mean."
+
+"How you will talk of types!  Didn't you see that she was unique?
+You may come back if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we
+will discuss her."
+
+Lindsay looked at his watch.  "I would come back for a quarter of
+an hour to discuss anything, or nothing," he replied, "but there
+isn't time.  I am dining with the Archdeacon.  I must go to
+church."
+
+"Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to
+church?  Why not say on arrival:  'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon
+and your mutton the same evening--c'est trop!  I cannot so impose
+upon your generosity.  I have come for the mutton!'"
+
+Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often
+before, by an orthodox consideration.  Duff Lindsay drove away in
+his cart; and still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss
+Howe stood leaning over the banisters, her eyes fixed full of
+speculation on the place where he had stood.  She was thinking of
+a scene--a dinner with an Archdeacon--and of the permanent
+satisfactions to be got from it; and she renounced almost with a
+palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's asking her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone.  "It is the lowest, isn't
+it--in the scale of human endowment?  Mimicry."
+
+Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but
+turned her eyes and her delicate chin up to Duff Lindsay with the
+protest.  Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up
+over it as if they would answer before his voice was set at
+liberty.
+
+"Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said.  "The mimic doesn't
+interpret.  He's a mere thief of expression.  You can always see
+him behind his stolen mask.  The actress takes a different rank.
+This one does, anyway."
+
+"You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked
+Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
+
+"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
+
+Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her.  She smiled upon
+their energy and, so to speak, disappeared.  It was one of her
+little ways, and since it left seeming conquerors on her track
+nobody quarrelled with it.
+
+"I've met them in London," she said.  "Oh, I remember one hot
+little North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--
+and they were always disappointing.  There seemed to be somehow no
+basis--nothing to go upon."
+
+She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful
+deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were
+unanimous in calling more than merely pretty and more than
+ordinarily refined.  That was the cursory verdict, the superficial
+thing to see and say; it will do to go on with.  From the way
+Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he might have been suspected of
+other discoveries, possible only to the somewhat privileged in this
+blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens to find out anything
+at all.
+
+"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his
+words was encouraging and provocative.  His proposition was
+obscured to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very
+last of her comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual
+with him.  "But Miss Hilda Howe has one."
+
+"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
+
+"I don't know.  She's an individual.  I prefer to rest my claim for
+her on that."
+
+"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but
+she closed them instead, and turned her head again to listen to
+Mrs. Barberry.  The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating
+the conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance
+and relief.
+
+"I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather," Mrs. Barberry
+said; "I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from
+the Fort, and I said, 'Never again!'  Fortunately the girls were
+just out, and not one of them understood, but those poor boys
+didn't know where to look!  And no more did I.  So disgustingly
+real."
+
+Alicia's eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger,
+and a little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling,
+hovered about her lips.
+
+"I was in England last year," she said; "I--I saw A Woman of Honour
+in London.  What could possibly be done with it by an Australian
+scratch company in a Calcutta theatre!  Imagination halts."
+
+"Miss Howe did something with it," observed Mr. Lindsay.  "That and
+one or two other things carried one through last cold weather.  One
+supported even the gaieties of Christmas week with fortitude,
+conscious that there was something to fall back upon.  I remember I
+went to the State ball, and cheerfully."
+
+"That's saying a good deal, isn't it?" commented Dr. Livingstone,
+vaguely aware of an ironical intention.  "By Jove! yes."
+
+"Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn't he?" Mrs. Barberry said.
+"Such a magnificent head.  I adore him in Shakespeare."
+
+"He knows the conventions, and uses them with security," Lindsay
+replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air,
+demanded--
+
+"Is the story true?"
+
+"The story of their relations?  I suppose there are fifty.  One of
+them is."
+
+Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a
+reminiscence of amateur theatricals.  "Their relations!" she
+murmured to Dr. Livingstone.  "What awful things to talk about!"
+
+"The story I mean," Alicia explained, "is to the effect that Mr.
+Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when
+he met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her
+passion for her art--I mean, of course, her affections--"
+
+"My dear girl, we know what you mean," cried Mrs. Barberry,
+entering a protest as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.
+
+"And precisely the reverse happened."
+
+"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.
+
+"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.
+
+"That's as you like to believe.  I fancy she knew about the man,"
+Lindsay contributed again.
+
+"Tables turned, eh?  Daresay it served him right," remarked Dr.
+Livingstone.  "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
+Barberry, we ought to be off?"
+
+"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
+enthusiasm.  "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad.  He
+caught it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear
+of him!  Good-bye, you nice thing"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--
+"Good-bye, Mr. Lindsay.  Fancy--a live bacillus from Hong Kong!  I
+should like it better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--
+goodbye."
+
+With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess
+the room, and the two people who were left.  Things fell into their
+places, one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the
+floor, in Alicia's hair and in her skirt.  Little meanings attached
+themselves--to oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose
+muslin sleeves were tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking
+Persian paintings, to odd brass bowls and faint-coloured
+embroideries.  The air became full of agreeable exhalations
+traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a vase of common
+country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could almost observe
+the process by which they were absorbed in her and given forth
+again with a delicacy more vague.  Lindsay sometimes thought of the
+bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a
+trifle gross and material.  Certainly as she sat there in her grace
+and slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
+morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
+vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure
+to present her in.  With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn
+for the traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you
+saw that she appealed instead.  There was an art in the doing of
+her hair, a dainty elaboration that spoke of the most approved
+conventions beneath, yet it was impossible to mistake the freedom
+of spirit that lay in the lines of her blouse.  Even her
+gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness of movement
+which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
+personal world of many effects.  Into her making of tea, for
+example, she put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she
+ordered more bread and butter in the worst possible rendering of
+her servants' tongue, without a thought except that the bread and
+butter should be brought.  Lindsay liked to think that with him she
+was particularly simple and direct, that he was of those who freed
+her from the pretty consciousness, the elegant restraint that other
+people fixed upon her.  It must be admitted that this conviction
+had reason in establishing itself, and it is perhaps not surprising
+that, in the security of it, he failed to notice occasions when it
+would not have held, of which this was plainly one.  Alicia
+reflected, with her cheek against the Afghan wolf-skins on the back
+of the chair.  It was characteristic of her eyes that one could
+usually see things being turned over in them.  She would sometimes
+keep people waiting while she thought.  She thought perceptibly
+about Hilda Howe, slanting her absent gaze between sheltering
+eyelids to the floor.  Presently she rearranged the rose in its
+green glass vase, and said, "Then it's impossible not to be
+interested."
+
+"I thought you would find it so."
+
+Alicia was further occupied in bestowing small fragments of cress
+sandwich upon a terrier.  "Fancy your being so sure," she said,
+"that you could present her entertainingly!"  She looked past him
+toward the light that came in at the draped window, and he was not
+aware that her regard held him fast by the way.
+
+"Anyone could," he said cheerfully.  "She presents herself.  One is
+only the humblest possible medium.  And the most passive."
+
+Alicia's eyes were still attracted by the light from the window.
+It silhouetted a rare fern from Assam which certainly rewarded
+them.
+
+"I like to hear you talk about her.  Tell me some more."
+
+"Haven't I exhausted metaphor in describing her?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Livingstone, with conviction; "but I'm not a bit
+satisfied.  A few simple facts sometimes--sometimes are better.
+Wasn't it a little difficult to make her acquaintance?"
+
+"Not in the very least.  I saw her in A Woman of Honour, and was
+charmed.  Charmed in a new way.  Next day I discovered her address--
+it's obscure--and sent up my card for permission to tell her so.
+I explained to her that one would have hesitated at home, but here
+one was protected by the custom.  And she received me warmly.  She
+gave me to understand that she was not overwhelmed with tribute of
+that kind from Calcutta.  The truthful ring of it was pathetic,
+poor dear."
+
+"That was in--"
+
+"In February."
+
+"In February we were at Nice," Alicia said, musingly.  Then she
+took up her divining-rod again.  "One can imagine that she was
+grateful.  People of that kind--how snobbish I sound, but you know
+what I mean--are rather stranded in Calcutta, aren't they?  They
+haven't any world here;" and, with the quick glance which
+deprecated her timid clevernesses, she added, "The arts conspire to
+be absent."
+
+"Ah, don't misunderstand.  If there was any gratitude it was all
+mine.  But we met as kindred, if I may vaunt myself so much.  A
+mere theory of life will go a long way, you know, toward
+establishing a claim of that sort.  And, at all events, she is good
+enough to treat me as if she admitted it."
+
+"What is her theory of life?" Alicia demanded quickly.  "I should
+be glad of a new one."
+
+Lindsay's communicativeness seemed to contract a little, as at the
+touch of a finger light, but cold.
+
+"I don't think she has ever told me," he said.  "No, I am sure she
+has not."  His reflection was:  "It is her garment--how could it
+fit another woman!"
+
+"But you have divined it--she has let you do that!  You can give me
+your impression."
+
+He recognised her bright courage in venturing upon impalpabilities,
+but not without a shade of embarrassment.
+
+"Perhaps.  But having perceived, to pass on--it doesn't follow
+that one can.  I don't seem able to lay my hand upon the signs and
+symbols."
+
+The faintest look of disappointment, the lightest cloud of
+submission, appeared upon Miss Livingstone's face.
+
+"Oh, I know!" she said.  "You are making me feel dreadfully out of
+it, but I know.  It surrounds her like a kind of atmosphere, an
+intellectual atmosphere.  Though I confess that is the part I don't
+understand in connection with an actress."
+
+There was a sudden indifference in this last sentence.  Alicia lay
+back upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among
+them, and looked away from the subject at the teacups.  Duff picked
+up his hat.  He had the subtlest intimations with women.
+
+"It's an intoxicating atmosphere," he said.  "My continual wonder
+is that I'm not in love with her.  A fellow in a novel, now, in my
+situation, would be embroiled with half his female relations by
+this time, and taking his third refusal with a haggard eye."
+
+Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness.  She
+lifted her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty
+suddenly revealed.
+
+"Why aren't you?" she said.  "I wonder, too."
+
+"I should like it enormously," he laughed.  "I've lain awake at
+nights trying to find out why it isn't so.  Perhaps you'll be able
+to tell me.  I think it must be because she's such a confoundedly
+good fellow."
+
+Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur
+made a shadow on the whiteness of her throat.  Her buffeting was
+over; she was full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.
+
+"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said.  "But why are you going?
+Don't go.  Stay and have another cup of tea."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same
+terms at New College, and now found themselves again together in
+the social poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily
+explain their walking in company through the early dusk of a
+December evening in Bentinck Street.  It seems desirable to supply
+a reason why anyone should be walking there, to begin with, anyone,
+at all events, not a Chinaman, or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand
+furniture, or an able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in
+both trouser pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful
+temper toward the nearest glass of country spirits.  Or, to be
+quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a Bulgarian, a
+Levantine, or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a carriage,
+to whom the able-bodied seaman represented the whole port.  The
+cramped twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they
+overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left,
+and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings
+and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past
+with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as
+possible aside.  Three parts of the tide of them were neither white
+nor black, but many shades of brown, written down in the census as
+"of mixed Mood," and wearing still, through the degenerating
+centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril of the first Englishmen who came
+to conjugal ties of Hindustan.  The place sent up to the stars a
+vast noise of argument and anger and laughter, of the rattling of
+hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered in its exaggeration,
+the red turban of a policeman here and there denoted little more
+than a unit in the crowd.  There were gas-lamps, and they sent a
+ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside the
+banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.
+They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns,
+built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history
+for Bentinck Street, and explained that whatever might be the
+present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones
+that loafed together into the fog round the first bend, they were
+once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue
+capital, that fancy dictated.  There where the way narrowed with an
+out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights
+grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with
+an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and
+Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical.  A torch
+flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a
+squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of
+betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little
+flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, and
+showed his heap of cakes that they were well-browned and full of
+butter.  From the "Cape of Good Cheer," where many bottles
+glistened in rows inside, came a braying upon the conch, and a
+flame of burnt brandy danced along the bar to the honour and
+propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied seaman might be
+thirsty when he came, for the "Cape of Good Cheer" did not owe its
+prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of our
+theology.  But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe
+shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the stitching.
+There were endless shoe shops, and they all belonged to Powson or
+Singson or Samson, while one sign-board bore the broad impertinence
+"Macpherson."  The proprietors stood in the door, the smell came
+out in the street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped in
+fried oil and fresh leather that out-fans even the south wind in
+Bentinck Street.  They were responsible but not anxious, the
+proprietors: they buried their fat hands in their wide sleeves and
+looked up and down, stolid and smiling.  They stood in their alien
+petticoat trousers for the commercial stability of the locality,
+and the rows of patent leather slippers that glistened behind them
+testified to it further.  Everything else shifted and drifted, with
+a perpetual change of complexion, a perpetual worsening of clothes.
+Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of prosperity.  It lay round his
+thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue cotton smock,
+and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking up and
+down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise of
+the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in his queue.
+
+Lindsay liked Bentinck Street as an occasional relapse from the
+scenic standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made
+personal business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial
+impression thrown into the transaction.  Arnold, in his cassock,
+waited in the doorway with his arms crossed behind him, and his
+thin face thrust as far as it would go into the air outside.  It is
+possible that some intelligences might have seen in this priest a
+caricature of his profession, a figure to be copied for the curate
+of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the common signs of
+the ascetic school.  His face would have been womanish in its
+plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only
+occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness
+which had the effect of being permitted, conceded.  He had the long
+thin nose which looked as if for preference it would be forever
+thrust among the pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the
+width of his mouth without perhaps detecting the patience and
+decision of the upper lip.  The indignity of spectacles he did not
+yet wear, but it hovered over him; it was indispensable to his
+personality in the long-run.  In figure he was indifferently tall
+and thin and stooping, made to pass unobservedly along a pavement
+or with the directness of humble but important business among
+crowds.  At Oxford he had interested some of his friends and
+worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of that
+Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her
+the responsibility.  Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to
+exist on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent
+animal, under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was
+among those who observed his waverings without prejudice or
+anything but an affectionate solicitude that, whichever way Arnold
+went, he should find the satisfactions he sought.  The conviction
+that settled the matter was accidental, the work of a moment, a
+free instinct and a thing made with hands--the dead Shelley where
+the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed him, under his memorial
+dome in the gardens of University College.  Here one leafy
+afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head in
+confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
+claim the vague tribute of his spirit.  Then fell the flash by
+which he saw deeply concealed in his bosom, and disguised with a
+host of spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as
+the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view.  The discovery
+worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated
+prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could
+yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis of
+the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions.  In the end
+he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view, as far from
+him as his will would carry, and walked away in another direction,
+from which, if he turned his head, he could see the Church of Rome
+sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in her skirts,
+looking mournfully after him.  He had been a priest of the Clarke
+Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood in
+the door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck Street, while Lindsay
+explained to Ahsing his objection to patent leather toe-caps; six
+years which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have
+cheerfully admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his
+personal hopes of achievement--lowered them with a heroism which
+took account of himself as no more than a spiritual molecule
+rightly inspired and moving to the great future already shining
+behind coming aeons of the universal Kingdom.  Indeed, his humility
+was scientific; he made his deductions from the granular nature of
+all change, moral and material.  He never talked or thought of the
+Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar Oriental brightness as
+stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather the ego and the
+energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in this world,
+thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy to
+survive at all.  It should be understood that Arnold did not hope
+to attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple.  He held
+vastly, on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the
+ministry of symbols, the use of rigours.  The spiritual consummation
+which the eye of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon
+of Bengal should be hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he
+could do to purify and intensify his infinitesimal share of the
+force that was to bring it about.  Meanwhile he made friends with
+the fathers of Bengali schoolboys, who appreciated his manners, and
+sent him with urbanity flat baskets of mangoes and nuts and
+oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round boxes of white
+grapes in sawdust from Kabul.  He seldom dwelt upon the converts
+that already testified to the success of the mission; it might be
+gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.
+
+As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his
+hand within Arnold's elbow.  It was an impulse, and the analysis of
+it would show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value
+continually renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common
+ground.  The physical nearness, the touch, was something, and each
+felt it in the remoteness of his other world with satisfaction.
+There was absurdly little in what they had to say to each other;
+they talked of the Viceroy's attack of measles and the sanitary
+improvements in the cloth dealers' quarter.  Their bond was hardly
+more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness of sentiment,
+clearness of eye.  Such as it was, it was strong enough to make
+both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
+impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
+Arnold's soutane.  It made its universal way for them, however,
+this garment.  Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and
+pressed with one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the
+padre sahib.  He, with his eyes cast down, took the tribute with
+humility, as meet, in a way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at
+the persistence of ecclesiastical tradition.
+
+Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
+broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a
+wave of rhythmic sound.  It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat
+sellers, and mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the
+continual auction of Kristo Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-
+hand.  In its vivid familiarity it seemed to make straight for the
+two Englishmen, to surround and take possession of them, and they
+paused.  The source of it was plain--an open door under a vast
+white signboard dingily lettered "The Salvation Army."  It loomed
+through the smoke and the streetlights like a discovery.
+
+"Our peripatetic friends," said Arnold, with his rare smile; and as
+if the music seized and held them, they stood listening.
+
+
+     "I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
+      All day on Sunday and six days a week!
+      I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
+      Fifty-two weeks in the year."
+
+
+It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh
+animation.  Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they
+picked their steps across the street to the door, and there
+hesitated, revolted in different ways.  Perhaps, I have forgotten
+to say that Lindsay came to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse,
+and had had a mother before whose name, while she lived, people
+wrote "The Hon."  Besides, the singing had stopped, and casual
+observation from the street was checked by a screen.
+
+"I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are," said
+Arnold.
+
+Their methods were just on the other side of the screen.  A bullet-
+headed youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders,
+fingering a cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment,
+passing the two men beside the door, and a light, clear voice
+seemed to call after him--
+
+"Ah! don't go away!"
+
+Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical
+speculation whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe
+was still pursuing the broad road to perdition.  The desire to
+enter sprang up in him: he was reminded of a vista of some interest
+which had recently revealed itself by an accident, and which he had
+not explored.  It had almost passed out of his memory; he grasped
+at it again with something like excitement, and fell adroitly upon
+the half inclination in Arnold's voice.
+
+"I suppose I can't expect you to go in?" he said.
+
+"Precisely why not?"  Stephen retorted.  "My dear fellow, we make
+broad our sympathies, not our phylacteries."
+
+At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic
+was the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with
+amusement the pulpit tone of the little epigram.  But this moment
+found him only aware of the consent in it.  His hand on Arnold's
+elbow clinched the agreement; he half pushed the priest into the
+room, where they dropped into seats.  Stephen's hand went to his
+breast instinctively, for the words in the air were holy by
+association, and stopped there, since even the breadth of his
+sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
+Booth.  Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General
+Booth; he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline
+and bushy, from a frame on the wall at the end of it.  The texts on
+the other walls seemed emanations from him; and the man in the
+short loose, collarless red coat, with "Salvation Army" in crooked
+black letters on it, who stood talking in high, rapid tones with
+his hands folded, had the look of a puppet whose strings were
+pulled by the personality in the frame above him.  It was only by
+degrees that they observed the other objects in the room--the big
+drum on the floor in the empty space where the exhorters stood, the
+dozen wooden benches and the possible score of people sitting on
+them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting up the
+curtness of the texts.  There were half a dozen men of the Duke's
+Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and
+three or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the
+Hooghly, who leaned well forwards their elbows on their knees,
+twirling battered straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the
+instant off the defensive.  One was a Scandinavian, another a
+Greek, with earrings.  There was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded
+negro, very respectable with a plaid tie and a silk hat; and
+beside, two East Indian girls of different shades, tittering at the
+Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali boy, who spelled out
+the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very clean Chinaman,
+who appreciated his privilege, since it included a seat, a lamp,
+and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no further.
+The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like the
+girls, dingy, undecipherable.  They made a shadow for the rest,
+lying along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.
+
+Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end
+of the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung
+visibly in mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was
+talking.  Laura Filbert was one of the women.  She might have been
+flung upon her chair; her head drooped over the back, buried in the
+curve of one arm.  A tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest
+her face; the other lay, palm outward in its abandonment, among the
+folds that covered her limbs.  The folds hung from her waist, and
+she wore above them a short close bodice like a Bengali woman.  Her
+head covering had slipped, and clung only to the knot of hair at
+the nape of her neck; she lacked, pathetically, the conscious hand
+to draw it forward.  She was unaware even of the gaze of the Duke's
+Own, though it had fixity and absorption.
+
+The man with folded hands went on talking.  He seemed to have
+caught as a text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung.
+"Yes, indeed," he said.  "I can tell heveryone 'ere this night,
+heveryone, that the Saviour is mighty to keep.  I 'ave got it out
+of my own personal experience, I 'ave.  Jesus don't only look after
+you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my friends, six days a week.
+Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on you--that's all your
+part of it.  I don't mean to say I don't stumble an' fall into sin.
+There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but oh, my
+friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
+of Jesus?  No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person.
+The person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is
+prayers; what can you expect?  And now I ask you, my friends, is
+Jesus a-keeping you?  And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it
+foolish to put off any longer?  'Ere we are met together to-night;
+we may never all meet together again.  You and I may never 'ear
+each other speaking again or see each other sitting there.  Thank
+God," the speaker continued, as his eye rested on Arnold and
+Lindsay, "the vilest sinner may be saved, the respectable sinner
+may be saved.  We've got God's word for that.  Now just a little
+word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
+Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls
+inside these four walls to-night."
+
+Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters
+on her knees on the floor.  As she moved she bent upon the audience
+a preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers,
+chances, from a point remote and emotionally involved.  Lindsay's
+impression was that she looked at him as from behind a glass door.
+Then her eyes closed as the other woman began, and through their
+lids, as it were, he could see that she was again caught up, though
+her body remained abased, her hands interlocked between her knees,
+swaying in unison with the petition.  The Ensign was a little
+meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless hair and tight
+drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she would have
+been bedraggled and a nagger.  She gained an elevation, it was
+plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation
+of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
+complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
+fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
+influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
+commission.  She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained
+minor key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened,
+her key to hearts.  She told the Lord in confidence that however
+appearances might be against it every soul before him was really
+longing to be gathered within His almighty arms, and when she said
+this, Laura Filbert, on the floor, threw back her head and cried
+"Hallelujah!" and Duff started.  The mothers broke in upon the
+Ensign with like exclamations.  They had a recurrent, perfunctory
+sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again cried "Praise the
+Lord!" Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty impulse to
+leave the premises.  Then she rose, and he watched with the Duke's
+Own to see what she would do next.  The others looked at her too,
+as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign
+Sand with humble eyes and disapproving lips.  As she began to speak
+the silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped
+shuffling his feet.  "Oh come," she said, "Come and be saved!"  Her
+voice seemed to travel from her without effort, and to penetrate
+every corner and every consciousness.  There was a sudden dip in it
+like the fall of water, that thrilled along the nerves.  "Who am I
+that ask you?  A poor weak woman, ignorant, unknown.  Never mind.
+It is not my voice but the voice in your heart that entreats you
+'Come and be saved!'  You know that voice; it speaks in the watches
+of the night; it began to speak when you were a little, little
+child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers that you
+have forgotten now.  Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender voice"--her
+own had dropped to the cooing of doves--"it is hard to know why all
+the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper it!  Strange,
+strange!  But the world is full of the clamour of its own
+foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where
+people come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches.
+You hear it now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.'  Why
+must I beg of you?  Why do you not come hastening, running?  Are
+you too wise?  But when did the wisdom of this world satisfy you
+about the next?  Are you too much occupied?  But in the day of
+judgment what will you do?"--
+
+
+     "When you come to Jordan's flood,
+      How will you do?  How will you do?"
+
+
+It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
+opportunity.  Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
+disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine,
+singing, and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum
+thumping out the measure, all the tambourines shaking together.
+
+
+     "You who now contemn your God,
+      How will you do?  How will you do?"
+
+
+The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made
+little of the words.  Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract
+the sentiment, but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that
+the tune was the thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism,
+and kept time with their feet.  Through the medley of voices--
+everybody sang except Arnold and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's
+seemed to flow, separate and clear, threading the jangle upon
+melody, and turning the doggerel into an appeal, direct, intense.
+When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to him, in the unmistakable
+intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.
+
+
+     "Death will be a solemn day
+      When the soul is forced away,
+      It will be too late to pray;
+      How will you do?"
+
+
+It was simple enough.  All her supreme desire to convince, to turn,
+to make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the
+room with whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face
+her own could seek with a kind of right to response.  But the
+sensation Duff Lindsay tried to sit still under was not simple.  It
+had the novelty, the shock, of a plunge into the sea; behind his
+decorous countenance he gasped and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds
+in his ears.  His soul seemed shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet
+the buffets themselves were enthralling.  In the strangeness of it
+he made a mechanical movement to depart, picked up his stick, but
+Arnold was sitting holding his chin, wrapped in quiet interest, and
+took no notice.  The hymn stopped, and he found a few minutes'
+respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the meeting, unveiling
+each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over the leaves of
+the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware, for airs and
+verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his untaken,
+sinful citadel.  There was time to bring him calmness enough to
+wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the
+sort of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch
+his state with interest.  Then, before he knew it, they were all
+down on their knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not
+aware of the meaning of a single word that she said, only that her
+voice was threading itself in and out of his consciousness burdened
+with a passion that made it exquisite to him.  Her appeal lifted
+itself in the end into song, low and sweet.
+
+
+     "Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
+      Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
+      There to my heart was the blood applied,
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it
+was over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the
+preliminary pangs of conversion by the methods of the Salvation
+Army.  Deliberately, however, he postponed further analysis of them
+until after the meeting was over.  He would be compelled then to go
+away, back to the club to dinner, or something; they would put out
+the lights and lock the place up: he thought of that.  He glanced
+at the lamps with a perception of the finality that would come when
+they were extinguished--she would troop away with the others into
+the darkness--and then at his watch to see how much time there was
+left.  More exhortation followed and more prayer; he was only aware
+that she did not speak.  She sat with her hand over her eyes, and
+Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
+herself with him.  He looked round almost furtively to detect
+whether anyone else was aware of it, this connection that she was
+blazoning between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into
+a sense of ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of
+stuffy smells.  When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a
+rapt effort to tell her that he perceived her intention.  That he
+should be grateful, that he should approve, was neither here nor
+there; the indispensable thing was that she should know him
+conscious, receptive.  She read three or four sacred verses,
+a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart, "Come unto
+Me." . . .  The words stole about the room like tears.  Then she
+would ask "all present," she said, to engage for a moment in silent
+prayer.  There was a wordless interval, only the vague street
+noises surging past the door.  A thrill ran along the benches as
+Laura brought it to an end with sudden singing.  She was on her
+feet as the others raised their heads, breaking forth clear and
+jubilant.
+
+
+     "I am so wondrously saved from sin,
+      Jesus so sweetly abides within;
+      There at the Cross where He took me in,
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+She smiled as she sang.  It was a happy confident smile, and it was
+plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of the last
+ten minutes' spiritual experience of many who heard her.  Lindsay's
+perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested
+for an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy
+of her calling, he felt a pang of compunction.  It was a formless
+reproach, too vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest
+to defining itself in the idea that he had gone too far--he who had
+not left his seat.  When the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand
+said, "The meeting is now open for testimonies," he knew that all
+her hope was upon him, though she looked at the screen above his
+head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal sense surging through him
+of what he would rejoice to do for her in compensation.  In the
+little chilly silence that followed he surprised his own eyes moist
+with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and so vain--and he
+felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum stood up
+and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with details
+about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.
+
+"Hallelujah!" said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air
+of hearing it for the first time.  "Any more?" and a Norwegian
+sailor lurched shamefacedly upon his feet.  He had a couple of
+inches of straggling yellow beard all round his face, and fingered
+an old felt hat.
+
+"I haf' to say only dis word.  I goin' sdop by Jesus.  Long time I
+subbose I sdop by Jesus.  I subbose--"
+
+"Glory be to God!" remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of
+the Duke's Own who were inclined to be amused.  "That will do,
+thank you.  Now, is there nobody else?  Speak up, friends.  It'll
+do you no harm, none whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll
+be surprised.  Now, who'll be the next to say a word for Jesus?"
+She was nodding encouragement at the negro cook as if she knew him
+for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in his gleaming white collar, was
+aware, in silent smiling misery, that the expectations of the
+meeting were toward him.  Laura had again hidden her eyes in her
+hand.  The negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and the
+prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
+perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of
+sin was the funniest thing in the world.  The silence seemed to
+focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and
+cleared his voice.  It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen
+Arnold, picking up his hat, got upon his feet instead.
+
+"I also," he said, "would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
+God--with all my heart."
+
+It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance
+of his office.  Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay, "Shall
+we go now?" he whispered, and the two made their way to the door,
+leaving a silence behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part
+of Ensign Sand at least, to be somewhat resentful.  As they passed
+out a voice recovered itself, and cried, "Hallelujah!"  It was
+Laura's; and all the way to the club--Arnold was dining with him
+there--Lindsay listened to his friend's analysis of religious
+appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that clear music above a
+sordid din, "Hallelujah!"  "Hallelujah!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When Alicia Livingstone, almost believing she liked it, drove to
+Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and left cards upon Miss Hilda
+Howe, she was only partially rewarded.  Through the plaster gate-
+posts, badly in want of repair, and bearing, sunk in one of them, a
+marble slab announcing "Residence with Board," she perceived the
+squalid attempt the place made at respectability, the servants in
+dirty livery salaaming curiously, the over-fed squirrel in a cage
+in the door, the pair of damaged wicker chairs in the porch,
+suggesting the easiest intercourse after dinner, the general
+discoloration.  She observed with irritation that it was a down-at-
+heels shrine for such a divinity, in spite of its six dusty crotons
+in crumbling plaster urns, but the irritation was rather at her own
+repulsion to the place than at any inconsistency it presented.
+What she demanded and expected of herself was that Number Three,
+Lal Behari's Lane should be pleasing, interesting, acceptable on
+its merits as a cheap Calcutta boarding-house.  She found herself
+so unable to perceive its merits that it was almost a relief to see
+nothing of Miss Howe either; Hilda had gone to rehearsal, to the
+"dance-house" the servant said, eyeing the unusual landau.  Alicia
+rolled back into streets with Christian names, distressed by an
+uncertainty as to whether her visit had been a disappointment or an
+escape.  By the next day, however, she was well pulled together in
+favour of the former conclusion--she could nearly always persuade
+herself of such things in time--and wrote a frank sweet little note
+in her picturesque hand--she never joined more than two syllables--
+to say how sorry she had been, and would Miss Howe come to lunch on
+Friday.  "I should love to make it dinner," she, said to herself,
+as she sealed the envelope, "but before one knows how she will
+behave in connection with the men--I suppose one must think of the
+other people."
+
+It was Friday, and Hilda was lunching.  The two had met among the
+faint-tinted draperies of Alicia's drawing-room--there was something
+auroral even about the mantelpiece--a little like diplomatists
+using a common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia
+drew the conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had
+more to cover, but was less particular about it.  The only thing she
+was bent upon making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of
+Miss Livingstone's effort to receive her as if she had been anybody
+else.  Alicia was hardly aware of what she wanted to conceal,
+unless it was her impression that Miss Howe's dress was cut a
+trifle too low in the neck, that she was almost too effective in
+that cream and yellow to be quite right.  Alicia remembered
+afterwards to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of intercourse
+with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set Celine at
+her--with such a foundation to work upon what could Celine not have
+done?  She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things
+Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room
+tones of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under
+the gallery, and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with
+them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown
+away upon two women and a little furniture.  A consciousness stood
+in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the
+picturesqueness of the bazar rode on long absorbed regards, one
+reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so
+conventionally creditable to them both that they might have smiled
+past each other under any circumstances next day and acknowledged
+no demand for more than the smile.
+
+The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of
+her head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her
+elbow on the table.  They had found a portrait-painter.
+
+"He has such an eye," said Alicia, "for the possibilities of
+character."
+
+"Such an eye that he develops them.  I know one man he painted.
+I suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the
+meantime he and everybody else had forgotten about it.  All but
+Salter.  Salter re-created it on the original lines, and brought it
+up, and gave it a lodging behind the man's, wrinkles.  I saw the
+picture.  It was fantastic--psychologically."
+
+"Pyschology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know," Alicia
+said.  "Do let him give you a little more.  It's only Moselle."
+She felt quite direct and simple too in uttering her postulate.
+Her eyes had a friendly, unembarrassed look, there was nothing
+behind them but the joy of talking intelligently about Salter.
+
+Hilda did not even glance away.  She looked at her hostess instead,
+with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily
+have mistaken it to be insincere.  It was part of her that she
+could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the
+moment, to swim in Alicia's.  Both the Moselle and the cutlets,
+moreover, were of excellent quality.
+
+"It's everything to everything, don't you think?  And especially,
+thank Heaven, to my trade."  Her voice softened the brusqueness of
+this; the way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms.
+That was the case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.
+
+"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to
+make a picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
+voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush
+to do it, or a pen or a chisel!"
+
+"I know what you mean," said Alicia.  She had a little flush, and
+an excited hand among the wineglasses.  "No, I don't want any;
+please don't bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in
+aspic.  "It's much more direct--your way."
+
+"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
+abiding so originally among the instincts!  Oh yes! if we are
+lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents.  The ideal has
+dignity enough.  They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity,
+with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are
+Shakespeare's--with being unliterary.  You might--good Heavens!--as
+well accuse a painter of not being a musician!  Our business lies
+behind the words--they are our mere medium!  Rosalind wasn't
+literary--why should I be?  But don't indulge me in my shop, if it
+bores you," Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that Miss
+Livingstone was never further from being bored.
+
+"Oh, please go on!  If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows
+confessed the tedium of Calcutta small talk.  "But why do you say
+you are lightly esteemed?  Surely the public is a touchstone--and
+you hold the public in the hollow of your hand!"
+
+Hilda smiled.  "Dear old public!  It does its best for us, doesn't
+it?  One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never
+believing in its treachery in the end.  But I don't know why I say
+we are lightly esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all.  I've
+done nothing--I've no right.  In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll
+write signed articles for the New Review about modern dramatic
+tendencies.  Meanwhile you'll have to consider that the value of my
+opinions is prospective."
+
+"But already you have succeeded--you have made a place."
+
+"In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg, I think they remember me in
+Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila.  But that
+wasn't legitimate drama," and Hilda smiled again in a way that
+coloured her unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and
+gold.  She waited an instant for these tints to materialise, but
+Miss Howe's smile slid discreetly into her wineglass instead.
+
+"There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines," she went on,
+her look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way
+with her hat.  "Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions.
+One wonders what America will do with those friars, when she does
+go there."
+
+"Do you think she is going?" asked Alicia vaguely.  It was the
+merest politeness--she did not wait for a reply.  With a courageous
+air which became her charmingly, she went on, "Don't you long to
+submit yourself to London?  I should."
+
+"Oh, I must.  I know I must.  It's in the path of duty and
+conscience--it's not to be put off for ever.  But one dreads the
+chained slavery of London"--she hesitated before the audacity of
+adding, "the sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and
+caught her breath as if she had watched the other woman make a
+hazardous leap.
+
+"You are magnificently sure," she said.  Alicia herself felt
+curiously buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of
+immediate achievement.  The lunch-table still lay between the two,
+but it had become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had
+drawn together, and regarded each other with absorbent eyes.  In
+Hilda's there was an instant of consideration before she said--"I
+might as well tell you--you won't misunderstand--that I AM sure.  I
+expect things of myself.  I hold a kind of mortgage on my success;
+when I foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping
+chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only
+to accomplish, every moment straddled with calculation, an end to
+all the byways where one finds the colour of the sun.  The
+successful London actress, my dear--what existence has she?  A
+straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many
+nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car,
+and the net result in every newspaper--an existence of pure
+artificiality infested by reporters.  It's like living in the shell
+of your personality.  It's the house for ever on your back; at the
+last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open
+eye on the floral offerings.  There never was reward so qualified
+by its conditions."
+
+"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"
+
+"Oh yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish!
+But then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing
+afterwards but the eternal strain to keep even with yourself.  I
+don't suppose I could begin to make you see the joys of a strolling
+player--they aren't much understood even in the profession--but
+there are so many, honestly, that London being at the top of the
+hill, I'm not panting up.  My way of going has twice wound round
+the world already.  But I'm talking like an illustrated interview.
+You will grant the impertinence of all I've been saying when I tell
+you that I've never yet had an illustrated interview."
+
+"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked.  "Don't they make
+you sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"
+
+Hilda threw her head back and laughed, almost, Alicia noted, like a
+man.  She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her
+handkerchief, as women often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed
+freely, and as much as she wanted to, and it was as clear as
+possible that tights presented themselves quite preposterously to
+any discussion of her profession.  They were things to be taken for
+granted, like the curtain and the wings; they had no relation to
+clothing in the world.
+
+Alicia laughed too.  After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
+prejudices.  She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar
+again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews.
+"They ARE atrocities," she said.  "On their merits they ought to be
+cast out of even the suburbs of art and literature.  But they help
+to make the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do
+that, of course--" and the pursed seriousness of her lips gave
+Alicia the impression that, though the whole world took offence,
+the expediency of the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.
+
+The servant brought them coffee.  "Shall we smoke here," said Miss
+Livingstone, "or in the drawing-room?"
+
+"Oh, do you want to?  Are you quite sure you like it?  Please don't
+on my account--you really mustn't.  Suppose it should mike you
+ill?"  If Hilda felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her
+face.  Nothing was there but cheerful concern.
+
+"It won't make me ill." Alicia lifted her chin with delicate
+assertiveness.  "I suppose you do smoke, don't you?"
+
+"Occasionally--with some people.  Honestly, have you ever done it
+before?"
+
+"Four times," said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the
+apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them.  "I
+thought it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--"
+
+"Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some
+Serene Highness's neck.  I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer
+to dispense with it.  In my bath, for instance, and almost always
+in omnibuses."
+
+"How absurd you are!  Then we'll stay here."
+
+Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia
+sacrifice two matches.
+
+"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on.  "Poor, dear old
+Rosy!  She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a
+kind of look of anxious mamma.  And it gets into her eyes and
+chokes her, poor dear; but blow her, if she won't be as Bohemian as
+anybody.  I've seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under
+her chin.  I got up and went away."
+
+"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting
+her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace.
+"I'm not old and I'm not grotesque."
+
+"No, but--oh, all right.  After you with the matches, please."
+
+"I BEG your pardon.  How thoughtless of me!  Dear me, mine has gone
+out.  Do you suppose anything is wrong with them?  Perhaps they're
+damp."
+
+"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette
+between her lips, "but in excellent order, really."  She took it
+between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold
+letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals
+through her nostrils.  It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a
+horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss Howe wouldn't do it again.  But
+she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's way of doing it.
+
+"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said contemplatively;
+"you're young and beautiful."  The freedom seemed bred,
+imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air.
+Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without
+wincing.  She had less than the common palate for flattery of the
+obvious kind, but this was something different--a mere casual and
+unprejudiced statement of fact.
+
+"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and
+there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace
+seemed to be dismissed between them.
+
+"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia.  She
+felt delightfully terse and to the point.
+
+"You mean Mr. Lindsay.  Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable.  Do you
+know him well?"
+
+Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side
+of them.  Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--
+it would have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.
+
+"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said.  Hilda had the
+sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a
+hard surface.  She looked attentively at the red heart of her
+cigarette crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.
+
+"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken.
+"As to the rest of the people--bah! you can't rouse Calcutta.  It
+is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior.  It's
+really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be
+idealised--made to serve ennobling ends.  But Mr. Lindsay is--
+different."
+
+"Yes?"  Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of
+her, the asking note was in the word.
+
+"We have done some interesting things together here.  He has shown
+me the queerest places.  Yesterday he made me go with him to
+Wellesley Square, to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the
+middle of it."
+
+"A statue?"
+
+"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people.  She wasn't new
+to me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was, and the
+performance.  She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of
+a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one.
+Light seemed to come from her, from her hair or her eyes or
+something.  I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms
+into the sunset when it was ended."
+
+"It sounds most unusual," Alicia said, with a light smile.  Her
+interest was rather obviously curbed.
+
+"It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one
+doesn't go round the corner."
+
+There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss
+Livingstone's desire to be informed.
+
+Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and
+waited.  The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke
+it herself.
+
+"And I regret to say it was I who introduced them," she said.
+
+"Introduced whom?"
+
+"Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army.  They
+met at Number Three; she had come after my soul.  I think she was
+disappointed," Hilda went on tranquilly, "because I would only lend
+it to her while she was there."
+
+"Of the Salvation Army!  I can't imagine why you should regret it.
+He is always grateful to be amused."
+
+"Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude.  He is rather
+intense about it.  And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on
+Mr. Lindsay's account.  Did I say so?"  They were simple, amiable
+words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but
+Alicia's crude blush--everything else about her was so perfectly
+worked out--cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up.  "Perhaps
+though," Hilda hurried on with a pang, "we generalise too much
+about the men."
+
+What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no
+generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant
+brought her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider.
+The card saved her the necessity.  She looked at it blankly for an
+instant, and then exclaimed, "My cousin, Stephen Arnold!  He's a
+reverend--a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in
+here.  What shall we do with our cigarettes?"
+
+Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was
+developing.
+
+"Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it?
+Drown the corpse in here, and I'll pretend it belongs to me."  She
+pushed the finger-bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant
+went into it.  "Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and
+there was no time for remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting
+itself at the door.
+
+"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portiere.
+
+Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition
+of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection.
+It reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully.
+
+Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and
+it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he
+would bless it.
+
+"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee."  He flavoured
+what he said, and made it pretty, like a woman.  "Let me confess at
+once, that is what brought me."  He stopped to laugh; there was a
+hint of formality and self-sacrifice even in that.  "It is coffee-
+time, isn't it?"  Then he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the
+moment, flushed with the luxury of her sensations, a vision as
+splendid as she must have been to him unusual.  But he only closed
+his lips and thrust his chin out a little, with his left hand
+behind him in one of his intensely clerical attitudes, and so stood
+waiting.  Hilda reflected afterwards that she could hardly have
+expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with upraised hands,
+but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his self-
+possession.  She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
+them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it,
+yet that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life.
+It was all as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint
+tradition, and she decided not, after all, to begin a trivial
+comedy for herself and Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen
+Arnold whether he objected to tobacco.  She had an instant's
+circling choice of the person she would represent to this priest in
+the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken
+out before them, and dropped unerringly.  It really hardly
+mattered, but she always had such instants.  She was aware of the
+shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand
+went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there.  An
+erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes
+that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken
+to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse.
+She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its
+proper note of insignificance.  Alicia, speaking of it once
+afterwards to Arnold, found that he had forgotten it.
+
+"Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said,
+and the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought
+Hilda a flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.
+
+"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street," she
+said, "but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold.  I act with
+Mr. Stanhope's Company.  If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't
+help knowing all about me, the letters are so large."  The bounty
+of her well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the
+simplicity; it was one of those least of little things which are
+enough.
+
+Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
+armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism.  He glanced away again
+quickly, and looked at the floor as he said he feared they were
+terribly out of it in College Street, for which, however, he had
+evidently no apology to offer.  He continued to look at the floor
+with a careful air, as if it presented points pertinent to the
+situation.  Hilda felt herself--it was an odd sensation--too sunny
+upon the nooked, retiring current that flowed in him.  He might
+have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that Alicia made, but she
+was aware that he did not, that he was struggling through her
+strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her.  He
+stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled
+as if he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked,
+making light accusations against the rigours of the Mission House,
+complaining of her cousin that he was altogether given over to
+bonds and bands, that she personally would soon cease to hold him
+in affection at all; she saw so little of him it wasn't really
+worth while.
+
+This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
+pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other
+end of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the
+firm, lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.
+
+"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules
+should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times
+a year."  She spoke with a kind of grave brightness; it was
+difficult to know whether she was altogether in jest.
+
+"There would be secession all over the place," Arnold responded,
+with his repressed smile.  "You would get any number of
+probationers; I wonder whether you would keep them!"
+
+"During that week," Hilda went on, "they should be compelled to
+dine and dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning
+before luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to
+all the variety entertainments.  Think of the austere bliss of the
+return to the cloisters!  All joy lies in a succession of
+sensations, they say.  Do you remember how Lord Ormont arranged his
+pleasures?  Oh yes, my brotherhood would be popular, as soon as it
+was understood."
+
+Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember
+flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sign
+or token of disapproval in Arnold's face.  What she might have
+observed there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight
+disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and
+something like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.
+
+Hilda began to put on her gloves.  The left one gaped at two
+finger-ends; she buttoned it with the palm thrown up and outward,
+as if it were the daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opera.
+
+"Not yet!" Alicia cried.
+
+"Thanks, I must.  To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have
+to dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock.  And,
+after pulling all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two
+in bed."
+
+"You!  But it's monstrous.  Is there nobody else?"
+
+"I wouldn't let anybody else," Hilda laughed.  "Don't forget,
+please, that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of
+people, mostly from the Antipodes.  Don't confound our manners and
+customs with anything you've heard about the Lyceum.  Good-bye.  It
+has been charming.  Goodbye, Mr. Arnold."
+
+But Alicia held her hand.  "The papers say it is to be The Offence
+of Galilee, after all," she said.
+
+"Yes.  Hamilton Bradley is all right again, and we've found a
+pretty fair local Judas--amateur.  We couldn't possibly put it on
+without Mr. Bradley.  He takes the part of"--Hilda glanced at the
+hem of the listening priestly robe--"of the chief character, you
+know."
+
+"That was the great Nonconformist success at home last year, wasn't
+it?" Arnold asked; "Leslie Patullo's play?  I knew him at Oxford.
+I can't imagine--he's a queer chap to be writing things like that."
+
+"It works out better than you--than one might suppose," Hilda
+returned, moving toward the door.  "Some of the situations are
+really almost novel, in spite of all your centuries of preaching."
+She sent a disarming smile with that, looking over her shoulder in
+one of her most effective hesitations, one hand holding back the
+portiere.
+
+"And next week?" cried Alicia.
+
+"Oh, next week we do L'Amourette de Giselle--Frank Golding's re-
+vamp.  Good-bye!  Good-bye!"
+
+"I wonder very much what Patullo has done with The Offence of
+Galilee," Arnold said, after she had gone.
+
+"Come and see, Stephen.  We have a box, and there will be heaps of
+room.  It's--suitable, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, quite."
+
+"Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on.  Why not?"
+
+"Thanks very much indeed.  It is sure to reward one.  I think I
+shall be able to give myself that pleasure."
+
+Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed,
+became a cup of tea; and his talk, while he stayed, seemed to
+suffer less from the limitations of his Order than it usually did.
+He was fluent and direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more
+than his prayers; that his glance at the world had still a
+speculation in it; and when he went away, he left Alicia with
+flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring a vague inward
+corollary upon her day--
+
+"It pays!  It pays!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
+offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December
+Saturday night.  The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise
+Party"--he sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended
+from the hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at
+9.30.  Prices as usual" with reference to this particular evening
+for a fortnight.  In the Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof and
+nobody could hear the orchestra when it rained--the Midgets were
+presenting the earlier collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and
+Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine years of age.  Colonel
+Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full blast on the Maidan
+for a week.  It became a great Occidental circus when Colonel Pike
+married the proprietress.  They were both staying at the Grand
+Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through
+cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say
+nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office.  And
+certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for
+while hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in
+the excusably imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural
+feature of the cold weather.  There was the Mystic Bower, too, in
+an octagonal tent under a pipal tree, which gave you by an
+arrangement of looking-glasses the most unaccountable sensations
+for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know Thyself!" where a
+physiological display lurked from the eyes of the police behind a
+perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri Chandra's Gully.
+Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition, sighed to think
+how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the Imperial
+Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape, and
+pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that
+rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee.  He thought
+bitterly, standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims
+of legitimate drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of
+wheels and the flashing of lamps on the way to accord another
+season's welcome to Jimmy Finnigan.  "I might've learned this town
+well enough by now," he reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel
+show's about the size of it."  Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's
+art of the large red lips and the twanging banjo; his thought was
+scornful rather than envious.  He aspired, moreover, to be known as
+the pilot of stars, at least in the incipience of their courses, to
+be taken seriously by association, since nature had arranged that
+he never could be on his intrinsic merits.  His upper lip was too
+short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while the perpetual
+bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave him an
+air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully
+misunderstood.  The stars, it must be said regretfully, in
+connection with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed
+him, coming down with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke
+in the uttermost ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to
+bring the cause of that misfortune before the Consular Courts.
+They seldom succeeded in this design, since Llewellyn was usually
+able to prove to them in advance that it would be fruitless and
+expensive, but the paths of Eastern capitals were strewn with his
+compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese dollars, Indian rupees, for
+salaries which no amount of advertising could wheedle into the box-
+office.  When the climax came, Llewellyn usually went to hospital
+and received the reporters of local papers in pathetic audience
+there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding statements
+the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the public
+clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a
+number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were
+subsisting in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda-water.
+"I'm in hospital," Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and
+I'm d---- glad of it,"--he always insisted on the oath going in,
+it appealed so sympathetically to the domiciled Englishman grown
+cold to superiority,--"for, upon my soul, I don't know where I'd
+turn for a crust if I weren't."  In the end the talented ladies and
+gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary
+arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous
+hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.  Then
+Llewellyn and Rosa Norton--she had a small inalienable income, and
+they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable
+reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour--would
+depart in another direction, full of gratification for the present
+and of confidence for the future.  Llewellyn usually made a parting
+statement to the newspapers that although his aims were unalterably
+high he was not above profiting by experience, and that next season
+he could be relied upon to hit the taste of the community with
+precision.  This year, as we know, he had made a serious effort by
+insisting that at least a proportion of his ladies and gentlemen
+should be high-kickers and equal to an imitation, good enough for
+the Orient, of most things done by the illustrious Mr. Chevalier.
+But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected The Offence of Galilee
+to open with tells its own tale.  He was convinced, but not
+converted, and he stood there with his little legs apart, chewing
+a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the chaste
+decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one
+more chance to redeem itself.
+
+It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable.  A
+ticca-gharry deposited a sea-captain; three carriages arrived in
+succession; an indefinite number of the Duke's Own, hardly any of
+them drunk, filed in to the rupee seats under the gallery: an
+overflow from Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons
+even standing room.  When this occurred Llewellyn turned and swung
+indifferently away in the direction of the dressing-rooms.  When
+Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors so early there was no further cause
+for anxiety.  Calcutta was abroad and stirring, and would turn for
+amusement even to The Offence of Galilee.
+
+Eventually--that is, five minutes before the curtain rose--the
+representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they
+were justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable
+audience.  The Viceroy had taken a box, and sent an Aide-de-Camp to
+sit in it, also a pair of M.P.'s from the North of England, whom he
+was expected to attend to in Calcutta, and the governess.  The
+Commander-in-Chief had not been solicited to be present, the
+theatrical season demanding an economy in such personalities if
+they were to go round; but a Judge of the High Court had a party in
+the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal Government sat behind
+him.  To speak of unofficials, there must have been quite forty
+lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial and
+prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold
+money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their
+wives' hair.  A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders;
+much of the hair was shining and abundant, and very black.  A turn
+of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and
+Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there
+glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which
+proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the
+zenana and the origin of the sun.  An audience of fluttering fans
+and wrinkled shirt collars--the evening was warm under the gas-
+lights--sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself.  Not an old
+woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those
+who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five--
+an audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for
+good manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait
+for the rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an
+atmosphere of affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with
+imperious chins, the use of quick orders in a world of personal
+superiority.
+
+Thus the stalls--they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs--and the
+boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs
+supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss
+Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other
+people.  The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with
+all the flotsam and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the look-out
+for offensive personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting
+freely.  Here, too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the
+cares of life--at a venture the wives were taking in washing in
+Brixton, and the children sent to Board School at the expense of
+the nation.  And in a climate like this it was a popular opinion
+that a man must either enjoy himself or commit suicide.
+
+The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all.
+It was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.
+
+Hilda's audience that night knew all about The Offence of Galilee
+from the English illustrated papers.  The illustrated papers had a
+great way of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences;
+they contained photographs of almost every striking scene, composed
+at the leisure of the cast, but so vividly supplemented with
+descriptions of the leading lady's clothes that it hardly required
+any effort of the imagination to conjure up the rest.  The postures
+and the chief garments of Pilate--he was eating pomegranates when
+the curtain rose, and listening to scandal from his slave-maidens
+about Mary Magdalene--were at once recognised in their resemblance
+to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of this satisfaction
+any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally unobserved.
+A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as if
+with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations
+to cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and
+people listened for familiar sentences with something like the
+composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of
+the second lesson.  But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-
+maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and
+commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as
+distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking
+up of this sentiment.  It was plain after all that no standard of
+ideality was to be maintained or struggled after.  The relief was
+palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at
+him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint
+inclination to be amused.  It was to be a play evidently like any
+other play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar
+appeals.  It is doubtful whether this idea was critically present
+to anyone but Stephen Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the
+dramatic substance offered them, and leaned back in their chairs
+with the usual patient acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too
+much of a company that found it worth while to come to Calcutta.
+The house grew submissive and stolid, but one could see half-
+awakened prejudices sitting in the dress-circle.  The paper-chasing
+Secretary said to the most intelligent of his party that on the
+whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting that the preference
+belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a notable lady
+novelist; and the most intelligent--it was Mrs. Barberry--replied
+that it did seem strange.  The depths under the gallery were
+critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile
+and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold
+shrank into the farthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box,
+and knew all the misery of outrage.  Pilate and the slave-maidens,
+Pilate's fat wife, and an unspeakable comic centurion, offered as
+yet hardly more than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole
+performance was already projected upon Arnold's suffering
+imagination.  This, then, was what Patullo had done with it.  But
+what other, he asked himself in quiet anger, could Patullo have
+been expected to do? the fellow he remembered.  Arnold tilted his
+chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre brows, at the
+opposite wall.  He looked once at the door, but some spirit of
+self-torture kept him in his seat.  If so much offence could be
+made with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred
+story, what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine
+personalities concerned?  He remembered, with the touch of almost
+physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two
+pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of
+surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the
+trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source
+of Patullo's intolerable inspiration.  Certain muscles felt
+responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he
+possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest, even of
+athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required to
+be kicked.
+
+Alicia was in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing
+plummet into the evening's experience.  Arnold, hesitating over the
+rudeness of departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she
+would hardly mind.  The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made
+a jest, which reached Stephen over his hostess's shoulder, and
+seemed to brand him where he sat.  He looked about for his hat and
+some excuse that would serve, and while he looked the sound of
+applause rose from the house.  It was a demonstration without great
+energy, hardly more than a flutter from stall to stall, with a
+vague, fundamental noise from the gallery; but it had the quality
+which acclaimed something new.  Arnold glanced at the stage, and
+saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested slaves and the tin
+centurion were still on, they had somehow lost significance and
+colour, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation
+had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced.
+She was almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive
+tints and the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in
+the mass of her fallen hair, and her unfettered body.  Beside her
+the slave-girls, crouching, looked like painted shells.  She danced
+before Pilate in strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and
+gesturings that seemed to be the telling of a tale; and from the
+orchestra only one unknown instrument sobbed out to help her.  The
+women of the people have ever bought in Palestine, buy to-day in
+the Mousky, the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her
+limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver
+anklets and armlets.  These shone and twinkled with her movements;
+but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility
+of the bazar.  People looked at their playbills to see whether it
+was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native
+theatre.  By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot
+upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house.  Under the
+unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there
+was a keenness of desire to see what would happen next which
+plainly curtailed the applause, as it does with children at a
+pantomime.
+
+"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
+Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not
+nearly so well done.  Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene
+had begun the well-known passage with Pilate, about which the
+newspapers absurdly reported later that if Miss Howe had not been a
+Protestant, and so impervious the Pope would have excommunicated
+her, and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed to afford
+him a better place.  He put an undecided hand upon a prop of the
+box that rose behind Alicia's shoulder, and so stood leaning and
+looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder
+cape of the frock of his Order than he knew.  Hilda, in one of
+those impenetrable regards which she threw straight in front of
+her, while Pilate yawped and posed nearer and nearer the desire of
+the Magdalene to be admitted to his household, was at once aware of
+him.  Presently he sat down again--it was still the profane, the
+fabulous, the horrible Patullo, but a strain of pure gold had come
+into the fabric worth holding in view, impossible, indeed, to close
+the eyes upon.  Far enough it was from any semblance to historical
+fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the
+woman, as historical fiction.  She dared to sit upon the floor now,
+in the ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to
+her breast, with her back half turned to her lord, the friend of
+Caesar, so that he could not see the design that sat behind the
+mask of her sharp indifference.  She rested her chin upon her
+knees, and let the blankness of her beauty exclaim upon the
+subtlety of her replies, plainly measuring the power of her
+provocation against the impoverished quality that camp and grove,
+court and schools, might leave upon august Roman sensibilities.  It
+was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its concentration
+behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the igniting,
+flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage.  Alicia, when it
+was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, "How the modern woman goes off upon
+side issues!" to which that lady nodded a rather suspicious assent.
+
+Long before Hilda had begun to act for Arnold, to play to his
+special consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so
+to speak, by a whirlpool of conflicting impulses.  She did so much
+more than "lift" the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in
+the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that whenever
+she appeared people irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made
+private acknowledgments to the effect that something was to be said
+even for an impious fantasy which gave her so unique an opportunity.
+To Arnold her vivid embodiment of an incident in that which was his
+morning and evening meditation made special appeal, and though it
+was in a way as if she had thrust her heathen torch into his Holy
+of Holies, he saw it lighted with fascination, and could not close
+the door upon her.  The moment of her discovery of this came early,
+and it is only she, perhaps, who could tell how the strange bond
+wove itself that drew her being--the Magdalene's--to the priest
+who sat behind a lady in swansdown and chiffon in the upper box
+nearest to the stage on the right.  The beginnings of such things
+are untraceable, but the fact may be considered in connection with
+this one that Hamilton Bradley, who represented, as we have been
+told he would, the Chief Character, did it upon lines very
+recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred books, very
+correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of the
+Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable
+remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular
+engraving, the limitations and the depression.  Under it one saw
+the painful inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other
+presentations, and realised with irritation, which must have been
+tenfold in Hilda, how he rebelled against the part.  Perhaps this
+was enough in itself to send her dramatic impulse to another focus,
+and the strangeness of the adventure was a very thing she would
+delight in.  Whatever may be said about it, while yet the shock of
+the woman's earthly passion with its divine object was receding
+from Arnold's mind before the exquisite charm and faithfulness of
+the worshipping Magdalene, he became aware that in some special way
+he sat judging and pitying her.  She had hardly lifted her eyes to
+him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded as if from
+afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement,
+the joy and the shame of her love.  As he watched and knew, his
+lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own
+renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his
+brotherhood, and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of
+how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering
+and transported thus.  The poverty of the play faded out; he became
+almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo's
+invention, and its insufferable mixture with the fabric of which
+every thread was precious beyond imagination.  He looked down with
+tender patience and compassion upon the development of the woman's
+intrigue in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts and
+guiles, to save Him who had transfigured her from the hands of the
+rabble and the high priests; he did not even shrink from the
+inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene's final
+passionate tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured
+Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept
+at His feet where He lay bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in
+the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's
+lips almost moved in words other than those of the playwright--
+words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her
+sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee . . ."  In his
+exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins.
+The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a white heat; the
+woman on the stage warmed her hands at it in two consciousnesses.
+She was stirred through all her artistic sense in a new and
+delicious way, and wakened in some dormant part of her to a
+knowledge beautiful and surprising.  She felt in every nerve the
+exquisite quality of that which lay between them, and it thrilled
+her through all her own perception of what she did, and all the
+applause at how she did it.  It was as if he, the priest, was borne
+out upon a deep broad current that made toward solar spaces, toward
+infinite bounds, and as if she, the actress, piloted him. . . .
+
+The Sphinx on the curtain--it had gone down in the old crooked
+lines--again looked above and beyond them all.  I have sometimes
+fancied a trace of malignancy about her steady eyeballs, but
+perhaps that is the accident or the design of the scene-painter; it
+does not show in photographs.  The audience was dispersing a trifle
+sedately; the performance had been, as Mrs. Barberry told Mr.
+Justice Horne, interesting but, depressing.  "I hope," said Alicia
+to Stephen, fastening the fluffy-white collar of the wrap he put
+round her, "that I needn't be sorry I asked you to come.  I don't
+quite know.  But she did redeem it, didn't she?  That last scene--"
+
+"Can you not be silent?" Arnold said, almost in a whisper; and her
+look of astonishment showed her that there were tears in his eyes.
+He left the theatre and walked light-headedly across Chowringhee
+and out into the starlit empty darkness of the Maidan, where
+presently he stumbled upon a wooden bench under a tree.  There,
+after a little, sleep fell upon his amazement, and he lay
+unconscious for an hour or two, while the breeze stole across the
+grass from the river and the mast-head lights watched beside the
+city.  He woke chilled and normal, and when he reached the Mission
+House in College Street his servant was surprised at the unusual
+irritation of a necessary rebuke.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting
+for Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a
+notable presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees
+crossed on the bench farthest back and the corner obscurest of the
+Salvation Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street.  It had become his
+accustomed place; sitting there he had begun to feel like the
+adventurer under Niagara, it was the only spot from which he could
+observe, try to understand and cope with the torrential nature of
+his passion.  Nearer to the fair charm of his kneeling Laura, in
+the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and the sound of the big
+drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away.  His persistent
+refusal of a better place also profited him in that it brought to
+Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he was one
+of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
+Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of
+not noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were
+not there, a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when
+the plate came round.  After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand
+regarded his spiritual interests with almost superstitious
+reverence, according them the fullest privacy of which she was
+capable.  The gravity which the gentleman attached to his situation
+was sufficiently testified by the "amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted
+better evidence than the amount.  Even Laura, acting doubtless
+under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away from him in her
+prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional allusion passed
+her lips which Duff could appropriate.  These, when they fell, he
+gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to
+visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four
+hours he would not see her again.  Her intonation went with them
+and her face; they lived on that.  They stirred him, I mean, least
+of all in the manner of their intention.  After the first quarter
+of an hour, it is to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more
+apprehensions on the score of emotional hypnotism.  He recognised
+his situation plainly enough, and there was no appeal in it of
+which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for example, could properly
+suspect the genuineness or the permanence.
+
+On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat
+through other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which
+he meditated mostly with his eyes on the floor.  His attitude was
+one quite adapted to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied
+with the burden of his transgressions it was one he might very well
+have fallen into.  When Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at
+her, at other times he looked at the situation in the brightness of
+her presence at the other end of the room.  She gave forth there,
+for Lindsay, an illumination by which he almost immediately began
+to read his life; and it was because he thought he had done this
+with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind her that
+evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest, with
+her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
+Street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see
+you.  When may I?  Any time that suits you.  Have you half an hour
+to spare to-morrow?"
+
+It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which
+she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory.  Not
+the frankness though, or the touch of "Now we are getting to
+business," that stood in her expression.  She looked alert and
+pleased.
+
+"You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?" she said.
+Her manner took Lindsay a trifle aback; it suggested that she
+conferred this privilege so freely.  "To-morrow--let me see, we
+march in the morning, and I have an open-air at four in the
+afternoon--the Ensign takes the evening meeting.  Yes, I could see
+you to-morrow about two or about seven, after I get back from the
+Square."  It was not unlike a professional appointment.
+
+Lindsay considered.  "Thanks," he said, "I'll come at about seven--
+if you are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a
+day."
+
+He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly
+reddened at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's
+road dust, and a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which
+she said matter-of-factly, "We are never too exhausted to attend to
+our Master's business."
+
+Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation; he looked gravely
+the other way.  "And the address?" he said.
+
+"Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call.  The entrance is
+in Crooked Lane.  Anybody will tell you."
+
+At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting.  Lindsay said
+"Thanks" again, and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for
+him--and picked his way over the gutters to the shop of his
+Chinaman opposite.  From there he watched the little company issue
+forth and turn into Crooked Lane, where the entrance was.  It gave
+him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not
+altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm,
+living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and
+attainable.  Then he went to his room at the club and found there a
+note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance,
+to say that she had not expected him.  "Friendly creature!" he said
+as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
+already there was one who guessed, who knew.
+
+One gropes in Crooked Lane after the lights of Bentinck Street have
+done all that can be expected of them.  There are various things to
+avoid, washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-
+gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar.  Lindsay,
+when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a
+quadrangle which was positively dark.  He waylaid a sweeper
+slinking out, and the man showed him where an open staircase ran
+down against the wall in one corner.  It was up there, he said,
+that the "tamasho-mems"* lived.  There were three tamasho-mems, he
+continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and one sahib, but
+this was not the time for the tamasho--it was finished.  Lindsay
+mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to
+avoid collision with a heavy body descending.  He inquired Miss
+Filbert's whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted
+a cigar, disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers
+and a dirty shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord.  At
+all events he had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on,
+it was the third storey.  Duff kept straight on in a spirit of
+caution, and just missed treading upon the fattest rat in the
+heathen parish of St. John's.  At the top he saw a light and
+hastened; it shone from an open door at the side of a passage.
+The partition in which the door was came considerably short of the
+ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite stretched a
+line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile pattern.
+Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian way
+to summon a servant, "Qui hai?"# he called, "Qui hai?"
+
+
+* Festival-making women.
+
+# "Whoever is there?"
+
+
+He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a
+door farther down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura
+Filbert with her hand upon the handle.  She made a supple, graceful
+picture.  "Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced.
+"Won't you come in?"  She clung to the handle until he had passed
+into the room, then she closed the door after him.  "I was
+expecting you," she said.  "Mr. Harris, let me make you acquainted
+with Mr. Lindsay.  Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."
+
+Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little
+chairs.  He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's
+garb of the Salvation Army.  It was apparent that he had been
+reading a newspaper; he had a displeasing air of possession.  At
+Laura's formula he looked up and nodded without amiability, folded
+his journal the other side out and returned to it.
+
+"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one.  He had a
+demon of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt
+dumb.  Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris.  He crossed
+his legs in greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible,
+looking at Laura, who sat down like a third stranger, curiously
+detached from any sense of hospitality.
+
+"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said
+pleasantly.  "I guess you can tell him what to do as well as I
+can."
+
+"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word.  "Is he?" said
+Mr. Harris, without looking up from his paper.  "Well, what I've
+got to say on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a
+proper an' a public place.  He can hear it there any day of the
+week."
+
+"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to
+say."
+
+"Then that's all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon
+his newspaper.  He appeared to devour it.  Laura looked from one to
+the other of them and fell upon an expedient.
+
+"If you'll excuse me," she said, "I'll just get you that bicycle
+story you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take
+it with you.  The Ensign's got it," and she left the room.  Lindsay
+glanced round, and promptly announced to himself that he could not
+come there again.  It was taking too violent an advantage.  The
+pursuit of an angel does not imply that you may trap her in her
+corner under the Throne.  The place was divided by a calico
+curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a mosquito curtain--
+she slept in there.  On the walls were all tender texts about
+loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed with
+photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic
+eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras,
+Ceylon, China.  A little wooden table stood against the wall
+holding an album, a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an
+irrelevant Japanese doll which seemed to stretch its absurd arms
+straight out in a gay little ineffectual heathen protest.  There
+was another more embarrassing table: it had a coarse cloth; and was
+garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a plate of plantains and a
+tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal evidently
+impending.  It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its core in
+Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked
+up.  "If you're here on private business," he said to Lindsay,
+fixing his eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him,
+"maybe you ain't aware that the Ensign"--he threw his head back in
+the direction of the next room--"is the person to apply to.  She's
+in command here.  Captain Filbert's only under her."
+
+"Indeed?" said Lindsay.  "Thanks."
+
+"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered,
+still searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eyes
+could permanently rest, "where, if you remember, Ensigns are the
+smallest officer we have."
+
+"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, governing
+a deep and irritated frown.
+
+"Maybe so.  This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the
+other--not in discipline anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity.
+"But you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can
+for you.  She's a hard-working officer."
+
+A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and
+canvas partition, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and
+steps in the opposite direction.  It enabled Lindsay to observe
+that Mrs. Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at
+which Mr. Harris shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed
+into silence, looking sternly at an advertisement.  The air was
+full of their mutual annoyance, although Duff tried to feel amused.
+They were raging as primitively, under the red flannel shirt and
+the tan-coloured waistcoat with white silk spots, as two cave-men
+on an Early British coast; their only sophistication lay in
+Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he ought to find this
+person humorous.  Then Laura came back and resolved the situation.
+
+"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have
+all enjoyed it.  Thank you very much."  There was in it the oddest
+mixture of the supreme feminine and the superior officer.  Harris,
+as he took the book, had no alternative.
+
+"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went, stumbling at the
+door.
+
+"Mr. Harris," said Laura equably, "found salvation about a month
+ago.  He is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage
+works here.  He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he
+often drops in in the evening."
+
+"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.
+
+"He would be, only for the carriage works.  He says he doesn't find
+himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet.  But
+he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the
+Ensign doesn't think there's any objection."
+
+Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs,
+her sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap.  The
+native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her
+consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever.  She had
+nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or
+its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him.
+Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of
+contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she
+counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that
+he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire.  This
+brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he
+had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her
+to a wider view of him.
+
+"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly
+it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her
+profile.  "Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"
+
+"There are some things I should certainly like you to know,"
+replied Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult--" he glanced
+at the lath and plaster partition, but she to whom publicity was a
+condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience,
+naturally had no interpretation for that.
+
+"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our
+tongues."
+
+The misunderstanding was absurd, but he saw only its difficulties,
+knitting his brows.
+
+"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said.
+"I cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."
+
+"Oh," Laura said simply, "do not be afraid!  I have heard
+confessions!  I work at home, you see, a good deal among the
+hospitals, and--we do not shrink, you know, in the Army, from
+things like that."
+
+"Good God!" he exclaimed, staring, "you don't think--you don't
+suppose--"
+
+"Ah! don't say that!  It's so like swearing."
+
+As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something
+intelligible, the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl
+of eighteen, also in the dress of the Army, came through from the
+bedroom part.  She smiled in a conscious, meaningless way, as she
+sidled past them.  At the door her smile broadened, and as she
+closed it after her she gave them a little nod.
+
+"That's my lieutenant," said Laura.
+
+"The place is like a warren," Lindsay groaned.  "How can we talk
+here?"
+
+Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis.  "Do you
+think," she said, "a word of prayer would help you?"
+
+"No," said Lindsay.  "No, thank you.  What is making me miserable,"
+he added quietly, "is the knowledge that we are being overheard.
+If you go into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs.
+Sand listening by the wall."
+
+"She's gone out!  She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take
+the evening meeting.  Nobody is in there except the two children,
+and they are asleep."  Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of
+her.  "Indeed, we are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now.  So
+please don't be afraid, Mr. Lindsay!  Say whatever is in your
+heart, and the mere saying--"
+
+"Oh," Lindsay cried, "stop!  Don't, for Heaven's sake, look at me
+in that light any longer.  I'm not penitent.  I'm not--what do you
+call it?--a soul under conviction.  Nothing of the sort."  He
+waited with considerateness for this to have its effect upon her;
+he could not go on until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the
+inundation of it.  But she was not even staggered by it.  She only
+looked down at her folded hands with an added seriousness and a
+touch of sorrow.
+
+"Aren't you?" she said.  "But at least you feel that you ought to
+be.  I thought it had been accomplished.  But I will go on
+praying."
+
+"Shall you be very angry if I tell you that I'd rather you didn't?
+I want to come into your life differently--sincerely."
+
+She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution
+was swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.
+
+"I won't tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-
+night except this--I find that you are influencing all my thoughts
+and all my days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way.
+You hear as much as that often, and from many people, don't you?
+So there is nothing in it that need startle you or make you
+uncomfortable."  He paused, and she nodded in a visible effort to
+follow him.
+
+"So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you
+just for my own pleasure--there must be some way of helping you,
+and being your friend--"
+
+"As Mr. Harris is," she interrupted.  "I do influence Mr. Harris
+for good, I know.  He says so."
+
+"Influence me," he begged, "in any way you like."
+
+"I will pray for you," she said.  "I promise that."
+
+"And you will let me see you sometimes?" he asked, conceding the
+point.
+
+"If I thought it would do you any good"--she looked at him
+doubtfully, clasping and unclasping her hands; "I will see; I will
+ask for guidance.  Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways.  If
+you have no objection, I will give you this little book, Almost
+Persuaded.  I am sure you are almost persuaded.  Above all, I hope
+you will go on coming to the meetings."
+
+And in the course of the next two or three moments Lindsay found
+himself, somewhat to his astonishment, again in the night of the
+staircase, dismissed exactly as Mr. Harris had been, by the agency
+of a printed volume.  Only in his case a figure of much angelic
+beauty stood at the top, holding a patent kerosene lamp high, to
+illumine his way.  He refrained from looking back lest she should
+see something too human in his face, and vanish, leaving him in
+darkness which would be indeed impenetrable.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a "ticca-gharry"--the shabby
+oblong box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a
+hackney carriage--was running away.  Coolie mothers dragged naked
+children up on the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts
+dug their lean beasts in the side, and turned out of the way almost
+at a trot; only the tram-car held on its course in conscious
+invincibility.  A pariah tore along beside the vehicle barking;
+crows flew up from the rubbish heaps in the road by half-dozens,
+protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead necklaces just escaped
+being knocked down.  Little groups of native clerks and money-
+lenders stood looking after, laughing and speculating; a native
+policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse, and
+they said to him, "Peace, brother."  To each other they said,
+"Behold, the driver is a 'mut-wallah'" (or drunken person); and
+presently, as the thing whirled farther up the emptied perspective,
+"Lo! the syce has fallen."  The driver was certainly very drunk;
+his whip circled perpetually above his head; the syce clinging
+behind was stiff with terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags.
+Inside, Hilda Howe, with a hand in the strap at each side and her
+feet against the opposite seat, swayed violently and waited for
+what might happen, breathing short.  Whenever the gharry thrashed
+over the tram-lines, she closed her eyes.  There was a point near
+Cornwallis Street where she saw the off front wheel make
+sickeningly queer revolutions; and another, electrically close,
+when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared in a gate to
+the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely right
+angles to her own derelict equipage.  That was the juncture of the
+Reverend Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with
+Amiruddin Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and
+Mohammedan fasting.  It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did
+in that interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to
+Amiruddin.  The ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any
+resolute hand could have impelled them away from the carriage-pole
+with which the roans threatened to impale their wretched sides.
+The front wheel, however, made him heroic, going off at a tangent
+into a cloth merchant's shop, and precipitating a crash while he
+still clung to the reins.  The door flew open on the under side,
+and Hilda fell through, grasping at the dust of the road; while the
+driver, discovering that his seat was no longer horizontal, entered
+suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with tears that the cloth-
+merchant should restore his wheel--was he not a poor man?  Hilda,
+struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by various
+lean hands of the bazar, and observed herself the central figure in
+yet another situation.  When she was in a condition to see, she saw
+Arnold soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the vague possibility
+of police complication having slipped away.  Stephen had believed
+the gharry empty.  The sight of her, in her disordered draperies,
+was a revelation and a reproach.
+
+"Is it possible!" he exclaimed, and was beside her.  "You are not
+hurt?"
+
+"Only scraped, thanks.  I am lucky to get off with this."  She held
+up her right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand
+had struck the road.  Arnold took it delicately in his own thin
+fingers to examine it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch.
+He looked at it with anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that
+Hilda silently smiled.  She who had been battered, as she said,
+twice round the world, found it disproportionate.
+
+"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his
+glance.
+
+"Indeed, I fear not."  The priest made a solicitous bandage with
+his handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified.  "It is
+quite unpleasantly deep.  You must let me take you at once to the
+nearest chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may
+give you a vast amount of trouble--but I am walking."
+
+"I will walk too," Hilda said readily.  "I should prefer it,
+truly."  With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her
+pocket, where a few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and
+groped for another.  "I really can't afford any more," she said.
+"He can get his wheel mended with that, can't he?"
+
+"It is three times his fare," Arnold said austerely, "and he
+deserved nothing--but a fine, perhaps."  The man was suppliant
+before them, cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open.  Hilda
+lifted her head and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble,
+where the sun stood golden upon the roadside and two naked children
+played with a torn pink kite.  Something seemed to gather into her
+eyes as she looked, and when she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to
+speak, as it had spoken before.
+
+"Ah," she said.  "Our deserts."
+
+It was the merest echo, and she had done it on purpose, but he
+could not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving
+hands, and turned and walked away with him, he was held in a
+frightened silence.  There was nothing perhaps that he wanted to
+talk of more than of his experience at the theatre; he longed to
+have it simplified and explained; yet in that space of her two
+words the impossibility of mentioning it had sprung at him and
+overcome him.  He hoped, with instant fervour, that she would
+refrain from any allusion to The Offence of Galilee.  And for the
+time being she did refrain.  She said, instead, that her hand was
+smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would
+use a carbolic lotion?  Stephen, with a guarded look, said very
+possibly not, but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-
+off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to
+disagreeable necessities; covered a preposterous impulse to cry
+with another smile.
+
+A thudding of bare feet overtook them.  It was the syce, with his
+arms full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery.
+"Oh, the good man!" Hilda exclaimed.  "My parcels!" and looked on
+equably, while Arnold took them by their puckered ends.  "I have
+been buying gold lace and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume,"
+she explained.  The bags dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers;
+he looked very much aware of them.  "Let me carry at least one,"
+she begged.  "I can perfectly with my parasol hand;" but he refused
+her even one.  "If I may be permitted to take the responsibility,"
+he said happily, and she rejoined, "Oh, I would trust you with
+things more fragile."  At which, such is the discipline of these
+Orders, he looked steadily in front of him, and seemed deaf with
+modesty.
+
+"But are you sure," said Hilda, suddenly considerate, "that it
+looks well?"
+
+"Is the gold lace then so very meretricious?"
+
+"It goes doubtfully with your cloth," she laughed, and instantly
+looked stricken with the conviction that she might better have said
+something else.  But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see
+no gibe in it, only a pleasant commonplace.
+
+"It might look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a
+censorious public."  Then, as if to palliate the word, he added,
+"They will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry
+myself, when it is plain that I might ride--and they see me doing
+that every day."
+
+All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt
+did impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since
+humour goes so far to destroy the picturesque.  Hilda without the
+paper bags would have been vastly enough for contrast.  She walked--
+one is inclined to dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being
+unintelligible--in a wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk,
+rather frayed at the seams; a trifle spent in vulnerable places,
+surmounted by an extravagant collar and a Paris hat.  The dress was
+of artistic intention inexpensively carried out, the hat had an
+accomplished chic; it had fallen to her in the wreck and ruin of a
+too ambitious draper of Coolgardie.  As a matter of fact it was the
+only one she had.  The wide sleeves ended a little below the elbow,
+and she carried in compensation a pair of long suede gloves, a
+compromise which only occasionally discovered itself buttonless,
+and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in that
+line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
+her note of appreciation.  Arnold in his unvarying gait paced
+beside her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into
+something less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he
+looked, in a quaint uniform, with his long lip drawn down and
+pursed a little in this accomplishment of duty, and his eyes
+steadily in front of him.  Hilda's lambent observation was
+everywhere, but most of all on him; a fleck of the dust from the
+road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a perpetual happy
+curve clung about her mouth.  So they passed in streets of the
+thronging people, where yards of new-dyed cotton, purple and
+yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called
+the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, golden-tongued Kali,
+half visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers
+in brass dishes and glass armlets and silver-gilt stands for the
+comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds
+and accepted them with indifference.  So they passed, worthy of a
+glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.
+
+They talked of the accident.  "You stopped the horses, didn't you?"
+Hilda said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the
+extent to which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate,
+under sacerdotal robes worn every day.
+
+"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly
+to be persuaded."
+
+"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she
+adventured like a vagrant in the sun.  The blood was warm in her.
+She did not weigh her words.  "I shouldn't like having my life
+saved.  The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion--I shouldn't
+know how to cope with it."
+
+"I will claim to have saved your other hand," he smiled.  "You will
+be quite grateful enough for that."
+
+She noted that he did not hasten, behind blushes, into the shelter
+of a general disavowal.  The cassock seemed to cover an obligation
+to acknowledge things.
+
+"I see," she said, veering round.  "You are quite right to
+circumscribe me.  There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that
+will out.  It is only the absence of it, too plainly expressed,
+that is unpleasant.  But you won't find that in me either."  She
+gave him a smile as she lowered her parasol to turn into the shop
+of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell European drugs, that promised
+infinite possibilities of friendship; and, he, following, took
+pleased and careful possession of it.
+
+An hour later, as they approached Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane,
+Miss Howe looked pale, which is not surprising since they had
+walked and talked all the way.  Their talk was a little strenuous
+too; it was as if they had fallen upon an opportunity, and,
+mutually, consciously made the most of it.
+
+"You must have some tea immediately," Arnold said, before the
+battered urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.
+
+"A little whisky and soda, I think.  And you will come up, please,
+and have some too.  You must."
+
+"Thanks," he said, looking at his watch.  "If I do--"
+
+"You'll have the soda without the whisky!  All right!" she laughed,
+and led the way.
+
+"This is vicious indulgence," Arnold said of his beverage, sitting
+under the inverted Japanese umbrellas.  "I haven't been pitched out
+of a ticca-gharry."
+
+It is doubtful whether the indulgence was altogether in the soda,
+which is, after all, ascetic in its quality, and only suitably
+effervescent, like ecclesiastical humour.  It may very probably be
+that there was no indulgence; indeed, one is convinced that the
+word, like so many words, says too much.  The springs of Arnold's
+chair were bursting through the bottom, and there were stains on
+its faded chintz-arms, but it was comfortable, and he leaned back
+in it, looking up at the paper umbrellas.  You know the room; I
+took you into it with Duff Lindsay, who did not come there from
+rigidities and rituals, and who had a qualified pleasure in it.
+But there were lines in the folds of the flowered window-curtains
+dragging half a yard upon the floor, which seemed to disband
+Arnold's spirit, and a twinkle in the blue bead of a bamboo screen
+where the light came through that released it altogether.  The
+shabby violent-coloured place encompassed him like an easy garment,
+and the lady with her feet tucked up on a sofa and a cushion under
+her tumbled head, was an unembarrassing invitation to the kind of
+happy things he had not said for years.  They sat in the coolness
+of the room for half an hour, and then, after a little pause, Hilda
+said suddenly--
+
+"I am glad you saw me in The Offence of Galilee on Saturday night.
+We shall not play it again."
+
+"It has been withdrawn?"
+
+"Yes.  The rights, you know, really belong to Mr. Bradley; and he
+can't endure his part."
+
+"Is there no one else to--"
+
+"He objects to anyone else.  We generally play together."  This was
+inadvertent, but Stephen had no reason to imagine that she
+contracted her eyebrows in any special irritation.  "It is an
+atrocious piece," she added.
+
+"Is it?" he said absently, and then, "Yes, it is an atrocious
+piece.  But I am glad, too, that I saw you."
+
+He looked away from her, reddening deeply, and stood up.  He bade
+her a measured and precise farewell.  It seemed as if he hurried.
+She only half rose to give him her unwounded hand, and when he was
+gone she sank back again thoughtfully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+"I have outstayed all the rest," Lindsay said, with his hat and
+stick in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, "because
+I want particularly to talk to you.  They have left me precious
+little time," he added, glancing at his watch.
+
+She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour
+for men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered
+more when he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the
+situation, while Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and
+went.  There was a mist in her brain as she talked to the Major-
+Generals and Deputy-Secretaries--it did not in the least obscure
+what she found to say--and in the midst of it the formless idea
+that he must wish to attach a special importance to his visit.
+This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke of out-
+sitting the others.  It impelled her to walk to the window and open
+it.  "You might stay to lunch," she said, addressing a pair of
+crows in altercation on the verandah.
+
+"There is nearly half an hour before lunch," he said.  "Can I
+convince you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute
+fool?"
+
+Alicia turned and came back to her sofa.  She may have had a
+prevision of the need of support.  "I hardly think," she said,
+drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest
+within, "that it would take so long."  She looked with careful
+criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.
+
+"I've had a supreme experience," he said, "very strange and very
+lovely.  I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it," he added
+quickly, watching her face; "so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it
+roughly."
+
+She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation.  "Why
+should you suppose I would touch it roughly?"  There was that in
+her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at
+all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose
+it, did not hear it.  He knew her so well.
+
+"A great many people will," he said.  "I can't bear the thought of
+their fingers.  That is one reason that brings me to you."
+
+She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked
+straight at him.  It nerved her to be brought into his equation,
+even in the form which should finally be eliminated.  She contrived
+a smile.
+
+"I believe you know already," Lindsay cried.
+
+"I have heard something.  Don't be alarmed--not from people, from
+Miss Howe."
+
+"Wonderful woman!  I haven't told her."
+
+"Is that always necessary?  She has intuitions.  In this case,"
+Alicia went on, with immense courage, "I didn't believe them."
+
+"Why?" he asked enjoyingly.  Anything to handle his delight--he
+would even submit it to analysis.
+
+She hesitated--her business was in great waters, the next instant
+might engulf her.  "It's so curiously unlike you," she faltered.
+"If she had been a duchess--a very exquisite person, or somebody
+very clever--remember I haven't seen her."
+
+"You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons."
+Lindsay visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated
+hardness.
+
+Alicia raised her eyebrows.
+
+"What do you expect one to imagine?" she asked, with quietness.
+
+"A miracle," he said sombrely.
+
+"Ah, that's difficult!"
+
+There was silence for a moment between them, then she added
+perversely--
+
+"And, you know, faith is not what it was."
+
+Duff sat biting his lips.  Her dryness irritated him.  He was
+accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming
+enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were
+ever reflected.  Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own
+consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon
+the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.
+
+"Don't make a mistake," she said.  "Don't."  She thrust her hand
+for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew
+it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.
+
+What he did say was simple, and easy to hear.  "That's what
+everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand."  He
+tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the
+strokes.  She looked down and counted them too.
+
+"Then you won't help me to marry her?" he said, definitely, at
+last.
+
+"What could I do?"  She twisted her sapphire ring.  "Ask somebody
+else."
+
+"Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do.  Go to
+her as my friend.  It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask.  Tell
+her any good you know of me.  At present her imagination paints me
+in all the lurid colours of the lost."
+
+The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles,
+and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly,
+suggesting Celine and the curling tongs.  She did not lose her
+elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect,
+but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty.  Her
+negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to
+expect.
+
+"No," she said.  "It must be somebody else.  Don't ask me.  I
+should become involved--I might do harm."  She had surmounted her
+emotion; she was able to look at the matter with surprising
+clearness and decision.  "I should do harm," she repeated.
+
+"You don't count with her effect on you."
+
+"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me.  I'm not a man."
+
+"But won't you take anything--about her--from me?  You know I'm
+really not a fool--not even very impressionable?"
+
+"Oh no!" she said impatiently.  "No--of course not."
+
+"Pray why?"
+
+"There are other things to reckon with."  She looked coldly beyond
+him out of the window.  "A man's intelligence when he is in love--
+how far can one count on it?"
+
+There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured,
+"Oh, I don't agree," with which Lindsay met it.  He rode down her
+logic with a simple appeal.  "Then after all," he said, "you're not
+my friend."
+
+It goaded her into something like an impertinence.  "After you have
+married her," she said, "you'll see."
+
+"You will be hers then," he declared.
+
+"I will be yours."  Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested
+on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
+
+"And I thought you broad in these views," Lindsay said, glancing at
+her curiously.  Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a
+heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon
+Major Livingstone, looking warm.  He, whose other name was the soul
+of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against
+Lindsay's going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a
+bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it.  Not that her added protest
+would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbation away with
+him as quickly as might be.  Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he
+shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to
+reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all
+effulgence on the other side of the door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+That same Sunday, Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about
+Hilda Howe, "We have not stood still--we know each other well now,"
+and when he commented with some reserve upon this to follow it up.
+"But these things have so little to do with mere length of time or
+number of opportunities," she declared.  "One springs at some
+people."
+
+A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance;
+and they talked about something else.  But perhaps this is enough
+to explain a note which went by messenger from the Livingstones'
+pillared palace in Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal Behari's
+Lane, on Monday morning.  It was a short note, making a definite
+demand with an absence of colour and softness and emotion which was
+almost elaborate.  Hilda, at breakfast, tore off the blank half
+sheet, and wrote in pencil--
+
+"I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon.
+No rehearsal--they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the
+theatre, so you will find me, anyway.  And I'll be delighted to see
+you."
+
+She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the
+scrap more secure in a yellow envelope.  It had an embossed post-
+office stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation.  Then she went
+back to an extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the
+reflection--"Can she possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?"
+
+Alicia came before five.  She brought a novel of Gissing's, in
+order apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing.
+Hilda was agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about
+anything, tipped on the edge of her bed--Alicia had surmounted that
+degree of intimacy at a bound by the declaration that she could no
+longer endure the blue umbrellas--and clasping one knee, with an
+uncertain tenure of a chipped bronze slipper deprived of its heel.
+Wonderful silk draperies fell about her, with ink-spots on the
+sleeves; her hair was magnificent.
+
+"It's so curious to me," she was saying of the novel, "that anyone
+should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book.
+It's like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass."
+
+"I fancy that the most desirable way," said Alicia, glancing at the
+door.
+
+"Don't you believe it.  The best way is to come out of it, to grow
+out of it.  Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the
+value of contrast, and the distinction of being the best.  You,
+poor dear, were born an artificial flower in a cardboard box.  But
+you couldn't help it."
+
+"Everybody doesn't grow out of it."  The concentration in Alicia's
+eyes returned again with vacillating wings.
+
+"She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet."  The slipper
+dropped at this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again.  She
+kept her foot in her hands, and regarded it pensively.
+
+"Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter,"
+she continued; "at all events, ready-made."
+
+"You have an audacity--"  Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.
+
+"Haven't I?  Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?"
+
+"I know it."
+
+"From him?"
+
+"From him."
+
+"Oh!"--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--"Really?
+Well, we can't let that happen."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You have a hardihood!  Is no reason plain to you?  Don't you see
+anything?"
+
+Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips.
+"I see only one thing that matters--he wants it," she said.
+
+"And won't be happy till he gets it!  Rubbish, my dear!  We are an
+intolerably self-sacrificing sex."  Hilda felt about for pillows,
+and stretched her length along the bed.  "They've taught us well,
+the men; it's a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female
+line.  You may be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated
+between the lady and the tiger.  A civilised one would have
+introduced the lady and given her a dot, and retired to the nearest
+convent.  Bah!  It's a deformity, like the dachshund's legs."
+
+Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not
+quite worth while, to follow.
+
+"The happiness of his whole life is involved," she said simply.
+
+"Oh dear yes--the old story!  And what about the happiness of
+yours?  Do you imagine it's laudable, admirable, this attitude?  Do
+you see yourself in it with pleasure?  Have you got a sacred
+satisfaction of self-praise?"
+
+Contempt accumulated in Miss Howe's voice, and sat in her eyes.  To
+mark her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.
+
+"It is idiotic--it's disgusting," she said.
+
+Alicia caught a flash from her.  "My attitude!" she cried.  "What
+in the world do you mean?  Do you always think in poses?  I take no
+attitude.  I care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he
+shall have what he wants--so far as I can help him to it.  You have
+never cared for anybody--what do you know about it?"
+
+Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling.  "I assure you
+I'm not an angel," she cried.  "Haven't I cared!  Several times."
+
+"Not really--not lastingly."
+
+"I don't know about really; certainly not lastingly.  I've never
+thought the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities.
+They entail the prettiest experiences."
+
+"Of course, in your profession--"
+
+"Don't be nasty, sweet lady.  My affections have never taken the
+opportunities of our profession.  They haven't even carried me into
+matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to
+the brink!  We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay."
+
+"You assume too much--a great deal too much.  She must be
+beautiful--and good."
+
+"Give me a figure.  She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty
+that lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious
+enthusiasm.  Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage
+would touch and bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of
+stale vegetation.  You want him to clasp that to his bosom for the
+rest of his life?"
+
+"I won't believe you.  You're coarse and you're cruel."
+
+Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this.  Hilda, still
+regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient
+shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
+
+"I'm sorry, dear," she said.  "I forgot.  You are usually so
+intelligent, one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to
+you.  Go into the bathroom and get my salts--they're on the
+washhand-stand--will you?  I'm quite faint with all I'm about to
+undergo."
+
+Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts.  Ignoring
+the third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside
+and laid her hand on Hilda's head.
+
+"Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry," she said.  It
+was a cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a
+necessity.
+
+"I am not very bad," Hilda improvised.  "Hardly more than a
+headache."
+
+"She makes light of everything," Miss Filbert said, smiling toward
+Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression.  Discovering
+the blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from
+her hands.
+
+"And what," said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss
+Livingstone, "might your name be?"
+
+There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a
+conventionality of the other world, and before its assurance Alicia
+stood helpless.
+
+"Her name is Livingstone," called Hilda from the bed, "and she is
+as good as she is beautiful.  You needn't be troubled about HER
+soul--she takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral."
+
+"Hallelujah!" said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious
+congratulation.
+
+"Much better," said Hilda cheerfully, "to take it at the Cathedral,
+you know, than nowhere."
+
+Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of
+the bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda's hair.
+
+"You don't seem to have much fever," she said.  "There was a poor
+fellow in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of
+one hundred and seven.  I could hardly bear to touch him."
+
+"What was the matter?" asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses
+about the third person in the room.
+
+"Oh, I don't know exactly.  Some complication, I suppose, of
+Satan's tribute--"
+
+"Divinest Laura!"  Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back.
+"Do take a chair.  It will be even more soothing to see you
+comfortable."
+
+Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed.  "Miss Howe
+is more thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones," she
+said, with vast kindness.  "I have often told her so.  I have had a
+long day."
+
+"It may improve me in that character," Hilda said, "to suggest that
+if you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is
+a good thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your
+bath.  Do you use those things?"
+
+Laura shook her head.  "Faith is better than disinfectants.  I
+never get any harm.  My Master protects me."
+
+"My goodness!" Hilda said.  And in the silence that occurred,
+Captain Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid
+for was a decayed tooth.  Presently Alicia made a great effort.
+She laid hands on Hilda's previous reference as a tangibility that
+remained with her.
+
+"Do you ever go to the Cathedral?" she said.
+
+The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert's features,
+as when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant
+from a flower.  Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries
+of dogma it may have been some other obscurity, but that was the
+effect.
+
+"No.  I never go there.  We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a
+tabernacle to ourselves."
+
+"Isn't it exquisite--her way of speaking!" cried Hilda from the
+bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful
+smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible.  But she
+went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus.
+
+"Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary
+enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied
+fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us.  The Army is His Army,
+He is Lord of our hosts."
+
+"A kind of chant," murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became
+aware that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of
+magnetism.  Then that impression was carried away as it were on a
+puff of air, and it is hardly likely that she thought of it again.
+
+"I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?" Laura said.  The
+sanctity of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested
+upon it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue
+of some other thing.  Hilda on the bed named it the constant
+feminine, and narrowed her eyes.
+
+"Dear me, yes," she said for Alicia.  "His Excellency the Viceroy
+and all his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their
+ladies, Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully
+choral, Under-Secretaries so thick they're kept in the vestibule
+till the bells stop.  'And make Thy chosen people joyful'!" she
+intoned.  "Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia
+Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the main
+aisle, advantageously near the pulpit."
+
+"You know already what a humbug she is," Alicia said, but Captain
+Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.
+
+"Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me," she said, rising to
+go through the little accustomed function of her departure.  "I'll
+be going now, I think.  Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to
+take her place at the Believers' Meeting."  She took Hilda's hand
+in hers and held it for an instant.  "Good-bye, and God bless you--
+in the way you most need," she said, and turned to Alicia, "Good-
+bye.  I am glad to know that we will be one in the glad hereafter
+though our paths may diverge"--her eye rested with acknowledgment
+upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves--"in this world.  To look at you
+I should have thought you were of the bowed down ones, not yet
+fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little more oxygen in
+the blood of your religion.  Remember the word of the Lord--
+'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!'  Goodbye."
+
+She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door.
+It sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes
+clung about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way.
+Miss Howe looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as
+uncontrollable as it was unreasonable.  "A saved soul, perhaps.
+A woman--oh, assuredly," she said in the depths of her hair.
+
+The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made
+something like a dash at an object about to elude her.  "Oh," she
+exclaimed, "wait a minute.  Will you come and see me?  I think--I
+think you might do me good.  I live at Number Ten, Middleton
+Street.  Will you come?"
+
+Laura came back into the room.  There was a little stiffness in her
+air, as if she repressed something.
+
+"I have no objection," she said.
+
+"To-morrow afternoon--at five?  Or--my brother is dining at the
+club--would you rather come to dinner?"
+
+"Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me."  She spoke carefully,
+after an instant's hesitation.
+
+"Then do come and dine--at eight," Alicia said; and it was agreed.
+
+She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and
+only turned when Hilda spoke.
+
+"You are going to have him to meet her," she said.  "May I come
+too?"
+
+"Certainly not."  Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door
+handle.
+
+"Are you going too?  You daren't talk about her!" Hilda cried.
+
+"I'm going too.  I've got the brougham.  I'll drive her home," said
+Alicia, and went out swiftly.
+
+"My goodness!" Hilda remarked again.  Then she got up and found her
+slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend
+Stephen Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street.  "Thanks
+immensely," it ran, "for your delightful offer to introduce me to
+Father Jordan and persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders
+he keeps in his tower at St. Simeon's.  An hour with a Jesuit is an
+hour of milk and honey, and belonging to that charming Order, he
+won't mind my coming on a Sunday evening--the first clear one."
+
+Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her
+pen.  Then she added:  "If you have any influence with Duff
+Lindsay, it may be news to you that you can exert it with advantage
+to keep him from marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the
+Salvation Army named Filbert.  It may seem more fitting that you
+should expostulate with her, but I don't advise that."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful
+air when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in
+any case it is likely that she would have gone in.  Mrs. Sand
+walked the floor, carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with
+blotches, which had inherited from its maternal parent a
+conspicuous lack of buttons.  Mrs. Sand's room was also ornamented
+with texts, but they had apparently been selected at random, and
+they certainly hung that way.  The piety of the place seemed at the
+control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with
+his father's regimental cap.  On the other side of the curtain
+Captain Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.
+
+"What kind of meetin' did you have?" asked Mrs. Sand.  "There--
+there now; he shall have his bottle, so he shall!"
+
+"A beautiful meeting.  Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro,
+you know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss
+Rozario from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's.  We had such a happy time."
+
+"What sort of collection?"
+
+Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper
+coins.
+
+"Only seven annas three pice!  And you call that a good meeting!
+I don't believe you exhorted them to give!"
+
+"Oh, I think I did!" Laura returned mechanically.
+
+"Seven annas and three pice!  And you know what the Commissioner
+wrote out about our last quarter's earnings!  What did you say?"
+
+"I said--I said the collection would now be taken up," Laura
+faltered.
+
+"Oh dear! oh dear!  Leopold, stop clawing me!  Couldn't you think
+of anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that?  Fever or no
+fever, it does not do for me to stay away from the regular
+meetin's.  One thing is plain--HE wasn't there!"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your
+reasons."  Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful.
+"I mean the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind,
+under the window.  A society man, I should say, to look at him,
+though the officers of this Army are no respecters of persons, and
+I don't suppose the Lord takes any notice of his clothes."
+
+"His name is Mr. Lindsay.  No, he wasn't there."
+
+The girl's tone was distant and cold.  The rebuke about the
+collection had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.
+
+"I hope you haven't been discouraging him?"
+
+Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.
+
+"I have entreated him to come to the meetings.  But he never
+attends a Believers' Rally.  Why should he?"
+
+"What's his state of mind?  He came to see you, didn't he, the
+other night?"
+
+"Yes, he did.  I don't think he's altogether careless."
+
+"Ain't he seeking?"
+
+"He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself.  The Lord has
+different ways of working.  What else should bring him, night after
+night?"
+
+Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with lifted
+eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly-disciplined
+smile behind her baby's head.  When she looked back again Laura had
+flushed all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which
+she felt was absurd.
+
+"My!" she said,--scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have
+been expected of her,--"you do look nice when you've got a little
+colour.  But if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the
+meetin's, you must be blind, that's all."
+
+Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a
+wand.
+
+"Then I hope I may go on bringing him," she said.  "He couldn't
+come to a better place."
+
+"Well, you'll have to be careful," said Mrs. Sand, as if with
+severe intent.  "But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say
+that.  You may be an influence for good.  It may be His will that
+you should be pleasant to the young man.  But don't make free with
+him.  Don't, on any account, have him put his arm round your
+waist."
+
+"Nobody has done that to me," Laura replied austerely, "since I
+left Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will.  Not that
+Mr. Lindsay" (she blushed again) "would ever want to.  The class he
+belongs to look down on it."
+
+"The class he belongs to do worse things.  The Army doesn't look
+down on it.  It's only nature, and the Army believes in working
+with nature.  If it was Mr. Harris I wouldn't say a word--he
+marches under the Lord's banner."
+
+Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even
+slightly complacent.
+
+"Well," she said, "I told Mr. Harris last evening that the
+Lieutenant and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and
+he seemed to think he'd been keeping company with me.  I had to
+tell him I hadn't any such idea."
+
+"Did he seem much disappointed?"
+
+"He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging
+to the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have
+to learn to walk alone."
+
+Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lips.
+
+"I don't know but what you did right," she said.  "By the grace of
+God you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you.
+But I have a kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay 'll be harder to
+convince."
+
+"I daresay."
+
+"It would be splendid, though, to garner him in.  He might be
+willing to march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor
+Captain Corby, of the Queen's army, did in Rangoon."
+
+"He might be proud to."
+
+"We must all try and bring sin home to him," Mrs. Sand remarked
+with rising energy; "and don't you go saying anything to him
+hastily.  If he's gone on you--"
+
+"Oh Ensign! let us hope he is thinking of higher things!  Let us
+both pray for him.  Let Captain Sand pray for him too, and I'll ask
+the Lieutenant.  Now that she's got Miss Rozario safe into the
+kingdom, I don't think she has any special object."
+
+"Oh yes, we'll pray for him," Ensign Sand returned, as if that
+might have gone without saying, "but you--"
+
+"And give me that precious baby.  You must be completely worn out.
+I should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should."
+
+"It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin'
+child out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her
+husband and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned
+the infant without protest at the time.  Laura carried him into her
+own room with something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more
+nursery rhymes, dating from secular Putney, than she would have
+believed she remembered.
+
+The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of
+some selectness.  If the Chinaman came, it was because of the
+vagueness of his perception of the privileges he claimed; and his
+ignorance of all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him
+out.  Qualms of conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young
+lady friends away, and these also doubtless operated to detain Duff
+Lindsay.  One does not attend a Believers' Rally unless one's
+personal faith extends beyond the lady in command of it, and one
+specially refrains if one's spiritual condition is a delicate and
+debatable matter with her.  In Wellesley Square, later in the
+evening, the conditions were different.  It would not be easy to
+imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment.
+The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted
+shadows down.  Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps
+shone, and tram-drivers whistled bullock-carts off the lines, and
+street pedlars lifted their cries.  A torch marked the core of the
+group of exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made
+glorious the buttons of the man who beat the drum.  She talked to
+the people in their own language; the "open air" was designed for
+the people.  "Kiko!  Kiko!"  (Why!  Why!) Lindsay heard her cry,
+where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd.  He looked
+down at a coolie-woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her
+haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil of half a century, and
+back at the girl beside the torch.  "Do not delay until to-morrow!"
+Laura besought them.  "Kul ka dari mut karo!"  A sensation of
+disgust assailed him; he turned away.  Then, in an impulse of
+atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back and
+dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap.  But he grew more
+miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden
+bench at a distance where he could not hear her voice.  Only the
+hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn.  In the chorus the
+words were distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain
+Sand--
+
+
+     "Us ki ho tarif,
+      Us ki ho tarif!"
+
+
+The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous
+jangle, a discordance of a specially intolerable sort.
+
+
+     "Glory to His name!
+      Glory to His name!"
+
+
+Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-
+woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the
+questionable reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee,
+she ought to be.
+
+His "Good-evening!" when the meeting was over, was a cheerful,
+general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was
+plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful.
+Lieutenant Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had
+thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the
+manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed
+everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the
+way.
+
+"Wait for me," Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
+appeal, as they moved off.
+
+"I guess you've got company to see you home," Mrs. Sand called out,
+and they did not wait.  As Lindsay came closer the East Indian
+paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not
+afford a coffin, and slipped away.
+
+"The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that," Laura said.
+Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and
+seemed perturbed.
+
+"What she said was quite true," he ventured.
+
+"But--anybody would think--"
+
+"What would anybody think?  Shall we keep to this side of the road?
+It's quieter.  What would anybody think?"
+
+"Oh, silly things."  Laura threw up her head with a half laugh.
+"Things I needn't mention."
+
+Lindsay was silent for an instant.  Then "Between us?" he asked,
+and she nodded.
+
+Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty.  He
+found her hand and drew it through his arm.  "Would you mind so
+very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?"  He spoke
+as if to a child.  His passion was never more clearly a single
+object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential
+impressions of her.  "I would give all I possess to have it so," he
+told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.
+
+"I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay."
+Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm.  He seemed
+to be a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one
+behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no
+serious entanglement.  It is not surprising that he saw only one
+thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something
+like invitation.  Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing
+point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.
+
+"Dear," he said, "you can't know--there is no way of telling you--
+what I mean.  I suppose every man feels the same thing about the
+woman he loves; but it seems to me that my life had never known the
+sun until I saw you.  I can't explain to you how poor it was, and I
+won't try; but I fancy God sends every one of us, if we know it,
+some one blessed chance, and He did more for me--He lifted the veil
+of my stupidity and let me see it, passing by in its halo, trailing
+clouds of glory.  I don't want to make you understand, though--I
+want to make you promise.  I want to be absolutely sure from to-
+night that you'll marry me.  Say that you'll marry me--say it
+before we get to the crossing.  Say it, Laura."  She listened to
+his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then made as
+if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and
+she heard him through, walking beside him formally on her bare
+feet, and looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in
+Putney.
+
+"I don't object to your calling me by my given name," she said when
+he had done, "but it can't go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay,
+and you ought not to bring God into it--indeed you ought not.  You
+are no son or servant of His--you are among those whose very light
+is darkness, and how great is your darkness!"
+
+"Don't," he said shortly.  "Never mind about that--now.  You
+needn't be afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know,
+outside your particular Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants
+you to marry him, that's how it is.  Will you?"
+
+"I don't wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I'm very much obliged,
+but I couldn't dream of it."
+
+"Don't dream of it; consider it, accept it.  Why, dear creature,
+you are mine already--don't you feel that?"
+
+Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of
+his eyes in her.  Her tired body even clung to him.  "Are you quite
+sure you haven't begun to think of loving me?" he demanded.
+
+"It isn't a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it's a question of the
+Army.  You don't seem to think the Army counts for anything."
+
+One is convinced that it wasn't a question of love, the least in
+the world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and
+the flame in him leaped up.
+
+"Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question."
+
+"Is that a quotation?" she asked.  She spoke coldly, and this time
+she succeeded in withdrawing her hand.  "I daresay you think the
+Army very common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great
+and holy crusade, and I march with it.  You would not ask me to
+give up my life-work?"
+
+"Only to take it into another sphere," Duff said unreflectingly.
+He was checked, but not discouraged; impatient, but in no wise cast
+down.  She had not flown, she walked beside him placidly.  She had
+no intention of flight.  He tried to resign himself to the task of
+beating down her trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse
+to leap over them.
+
+"Another sphere,"--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation.
+"I suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same."
+
+"Not quite the same.  You would have to drive to see your sinners
+in a carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them
+in--what do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or
+pearls.  I think I would rather see you in pearls."  He was aware
+of the inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped
+to laugh inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn
+of her head.
+
+"We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most
+of them would be on Government House list, just as most of your
+present ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the
+police magistrates.  But you would find just as much to do for
+them."
+
+"I should not even know how to act in such company."
+
+"You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some
+people I know; delightful people, who will understand.  A year!
+You will learn in three months--what odds and ends there are to
+know.  I couldn't spare you for a year."
+
+Lindsay stopped.  He had to.  Captain Filbert was murmuring the
+cadences of a hymn.  She went through two stanzas, and covered her
+eyes for a moment with her hand.  When she spoke it was in a quiet,
+level, almost mechanical way.  "Yes," she said.  "The Cross and the
+Crown, the Crown and the Cross.  Father in heaven, I do not forget
+Thy will and Thy purpose, that I should bring the word of Thy love
+to the poor and the lowly, the outcast and those despised.  And
+what I say to this man, who offers me the gifts and the gladness of
+a world that had none for Thee, is the answer Thou hast put in my
+heart--that the work is Thine and that I am Thine, and he has no
+part or lot in me, nor can ever have.  Here is Crooked Lane.  Good-
+night, Mr. Lindsay."  She had slipped into the devious darkness of
+the place before he could find any reply, before he quite realised,
+indeed, that they had reached her lodging.  He could only utter a
+vague "Goodnight," after her, formulating more definite statements
+to himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Miss Howe was walking in the business quarter of Calcutta.  It was
+the business quarter, yet the air was gay with the dimpling of
+piano notes, and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on
+yellow stuccoed flats above the shops and the offices.  There the
+pleasant north wind blew banners of muslin curtains out of wide
+windows, and little gardens of palms in pots showed behind the
+balustrades of the flat roofs whenever a storey ran short.
+Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary well-being, a sense
+of lifted burden.  The stucco streets were too slovenly to be
+purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them, the pariahs
+blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in the
+cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices
+or circled against the high blue sky.  It was enjoyable to be
+abroad, in the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with
+brown humility half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility
+seemed well affected toward the world, alert and content.  The air
+was full of the comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced
+luxuries, and the incense of wayside trees; it was as if the sun
+laid a bland compelling hand upon the city, bidding strange flowers
+bloom and strange fruits increase.  Brokers' gharries rattled past,
+each holding a pale young man preoccupied with a notebook; where
+the bullock-carts gathered themselves together and blocked the road
+the pale young men put excited heads out of the gharry windows and
+used remarkable imprecations.  One of them, as Hilda turned into
+the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out to take off his
+hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the pleasant
+reflection of his infinite interest in life.  "Upon my word," she
+said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of
+a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, "he's
+so lighthearted, so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous
+effect even of a failure like the one he contemplates."
+
+She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman,
+and followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who
+hardly lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to
+look at her--so many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle
+gave prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and they were so
+much alike.  At all events they carried a passport to indifference
+in the fact that they all wanted something, and it was clear to the
+meanest intelligence that they appeared to be more magnificent than
+they were, visions in dazzling complexions and long kid gloves,
+rattling up in third-class ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder
+clinging to their skirts.  It was less interesting still when they
+belonged to the other class, the shabby ladies, nearly always in
+black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court, or sons before the
+police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible, "kept out of
+the paper."  Successful or not these always wept on their way out,
+and nothing could be more depressing.  The only gleam of
+entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib
+occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of
+a boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in
+leading Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local
+columns of the Chronicle--a lady who had never known what a bailiff
+looked like in the lifetime of her first husband, or her second
+either.  Then at the sound of a pudgy blow upon a table, or high
+abusive accents in the rapid elaborate cadences of the domiciled
+East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would glance at Gobind Babu with a
+careful smile, for the manager-sahib who dispensed so much galli*
+was now receiving the same, and defenceless.
+
+
+* Abuse.
+
+
+The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in.  He did not rise--
+he was one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee
+exports in such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and
+she had come on business.  He gave her a nod, however, and an
+affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on
+the other side of the table.  He had once made three hundred rupees
+in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and
+speculator gamely shrewd.  Tapping the table with his blue pencil
+he asked Miss Howe how the world was using HER.
+
+"Let me see," said Hilda, a trifle absent-mindedly, "were you here
+last cold weather--I rather imagine you were, weren't you?"
+
+"I was; I had the pleasure of--"
+
+"To be sure.  You got the place in December, when that poor fellow
+Baker died.  Baker was a country-bred I know, but he always kept
+his contracts, while you got your po-lish in Glesca, and your name
+is Macphairson--isn't it?"
+
+"I was never in Glasgow in my life, and my name is Macandrew," said
+the manager, putting with some aggressiveness a paper-weight on a
+pile of bills.
+
+"Never mind," said Hilda, again wrapped in thought, "don't
+apologise--it's near enough.  Well, Mr. Macandrew,"--her tone came
+to a point,--"what is the Stanhope Company's advertisement worth a
+month to the Chronicle?"
+
+"A hundred rupees maybe--there or thereabouts;" and Mr. Macandrew,
+with a vast show of indifference, picked up a letter and began to
+tear at the end of it.
+
+"One hundred and fifty-five I think, to be precise.  That
+communication will wait, won't it?  What is it--Kally Nath Mitter's
+paper and stores bill?  You won't be able to pay it any quicker if
+we withdraw our advertisement."
+
+"Why should ye withdraw it?"
+
+"It was given to you on the understanding that notices should
+appear of every Wednesday and Saturday's performance.  For two
+Wednesdays there has been no notice, and last Saturday night you
+sent a fool."
+
+"So Muster Stanhope thinks o' withdrawin' his advertisement?"
+
+"He is very much of that mind."
+
+The manager put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned
+back in his chair, and demonstrated the principle that had given
+him a gold watch chain--"never be bluffed."
+
+"Ye can withdraw it," he said, with a warily experimental eye upon
+her.
+
+"How reasonable of you not to make a fuss!  We'll have the order to
+discontinue in writing, please.  If you'll give me a pen and paper--
+thanks--and I'll keep a copy."
+
+"Stanhope has wanted to transfer it to the Market Gazette for some
+time," she went on as she wrote.
+
+"That's not a newspaper.  You'll get no notices there."
+
+"Cheaper on that account, probably."
+
+"They charge like the very deevil.  D'ye know the rates of them?"
+
+"I can't say I do."
+
+"There's a man on our staff that doesn't like your show.  We'll be
+able to send him every night now."
+
+"When we withdraw our advertisement?"
+
+"Just then."
+
+"All right," said Hilda.  "It will be interesting to point out in
+the Indian Empire the remarkable growth of independent criticism in
+the Chronicle since Mr. Stanhope no longer uses the space at his
+disposal.  I hope your man will be very nasty indeed.  You might as
+well hand over the permanent passes--the gentleman will expect, I
+suppose, to pay."
+
+"They'll be in the yeditorial department," said Mr. Macandrew, but
+he did not summon a messenger to go for them.  Instead he raised
+his eyebrows in a manner that expressed the necessity of making the
+best of it, and humorously scratched his head.
+
+"We have four hundred pounds of new type coming out in the Almora--
+she's due on Thursday," he said.  "Entirely for the advertisements.
+We'll have a fine display next week.  It's grand type--none of your
+Calcutta-made stuff."
+
+"Pays to bring it out, does it?" asked Hilda inattentively, copying
+her letter.
+
+"Pays the advertisers."  There were ingratiating qualities in the
+managerial smile.  Hilda inspected them coldly.
+
+"There's your notice of withdrawal," she said.  "Good-morning."
+
+"Think of that new type, and how lovely Jimmy Finnigan's ad will
+look in it."
+
+"That's all right.  Good-morning."  Miss Howe approached the door,
+the blue glance of Macandrew pursuant.
+
+"No notices for two Wednesdays, eh?  We'll have to see about that.
+I was thinkin' of transferrin' your space to the third page; it's a
+more advantageous position--and no extra charge--but ye'll not
+mention it to Jimmy."
+
+Miss Howe lifted an arrogant chin.  "Do I understand you'll do
+that, and guarantee regular notices, if we leave the advertisement
+with you?"
+
+Mr. Macandrew looked at her expressively, and tore, with a gesture
+of moderated recklessness, the notice of withdrawal in two.
+
+"Rest easy," he said, "I'll see about it.  I'd go the len'th of
+attendin' myself to-night, if ye could spare two three extra
+places."
+
+"Moderate Macandrew!"
+
+"Moderate enough.  I've got some frien's stayin' in the same place
+with me from Behar--indigo people.  I was thinkin' I'd give them a
+treat, if three places c'd be spared next to the Chronicle seats."
+
+"We do Lady Whippleton to-night and the booking's been heavy.  Five
+is too many, Mr. Macandrew, even if you promised not to write the
+notice yourself."
+
+"I might pay for one;" Macandrew drew red cartwheels on his
+blotting-pad.
+
+"Those seats are sure to be gone.  I'll send you a box.  Stanhope's
+as bad as he can be with dysentery--you might make a local out of
+that.  Be sure to mention he can't see anybody--it's absurd the way
+Calcutta people want to be paid."
+
+"A box'll be Grand," said Mr. Macandrew.  "I'll see ye get plenty
+of ancores.  Can ye manage the door?  Good-day, then."
+
+Hilda stepped out on the landing.  The heavy, regular thud of the
+presses came up from below.  They were printing the edition that
+took the world's news to planters' bungalows in the jungle of Assam
+and the lonely policeman on the edge of Manipore.  The smell of the
+newspaper of to-day and of yesterday, and of a year ago, stood in
+the air; through an open door she saw the dusty, uneven edges of
+files of them, piled on the floor.  Three or four messengers
+squatted beside the wall, with slumbrous heads between their knees.
+Occasionally a shout came from the room inside, and one of them,
+crying "Hazur!" with instant alacrity, stretched himself mightily,
+loafed upon his feet and went in, emerging a moment later carrying
+written sheets, with which he disappeared into the regions below.
+The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it, through an
+open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and green
+leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his
+grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation.  A Government
+peon in scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace,
+bearing a packet with an official seal.  The place, with its ink-
+smeared walls and high ceilings, spoke between dusty yawns of the
+languor and the leisure which might attend the manipulation of the
+business of life, and Hilda paused for an instant to perceive what
+it said.  Then she walked behind her card into the next room, where
+a young gentleman, reading proofs in his shirt sleeves, flung
+himself upon his coat and struggled into it at her approach.  He
+seemed to have the blackest hair and the softest eyes and the
+neatest moustache available, all set in a complexion frankly olive,
+amiable English cut, in amiable Oriental colour, and the whole
+illumined, when once the coat was on and the collar perfectly
+turned down, by the liveliest, most engaging smile.  Standing with
+his head slightly on one side and one hand resting on the table,
+while the other saw that nothing was disarranged between collar and
+top waistcoat button, he was an interjection point of invitation
+and attention.
+
+"The Editor of the Chronicle?" Hilda asked with diffident dignity,
+and very well informed to the contrary.
+
+"NOT the editor--I am sorry to say."  The confession was
+delightfully vivid--in the plenitude of his candour it was plain
+that he didn't care who knew that he was sorry he was not the
+editor.  "In journalistic parlance, the sub editor," he added.
+"Will you be seated, Miss Howe?" and with a tasteful silk pocket
+handkerchief he whisked the bottom of a chair for her.
+
+"Then you are Mr. Molyneux Sinclair," Hilda declared.  "You have
+been pointed out to me on several first nights.  Oh, I know very
+well where the Chronicle seats are!"
+
+Mr. Sinclair bowed with infinite gratification, and tucked the silk
+handkerchief back so that only a fold was visible.  "We members of
+the Fourth Estate are fairly well known, I'm afraid, in Calcutta,"
+he said.  "Personally, I could sometimes wish it were otherwise.
+But certainly not in this instance."
+
+Hilda gave him a gay little smile.  "I suppose the editor," she
+said, with a casual glance about the room, "is hammering out his
+leader for to-morrow's paper.  Does he write half and do you write
+half, or how do you manage?"
+
+A seriousness overspread Mr. Sinclair's countenance, which
+nevertheless irradiated, as if he could not help it, with beaming
+eyes.  "Ah, those are the secrets of the prison-house, Miss Howe.
+Unfortunately it is not etiquette for me to say in what proportion
+I contribute the leading articles of the Chronicle.  But I can tell
+you in confidence that if it were not for the editor's prejudices--
+rank prejudices--it would be a good deal larger."
+
+"Ah, his prejudices!  Why not be quite frank, Mr. Sinclair, and say
+that he is just a little tiny bit jealous of his staff.  All
+editors are, you know."  Miss Howe shook her head in philosophical
+deprecation of the peccadillo, and Mr. Sinclair cast a smiling,
+embarrassed glance at his smart brown leather boot.  The glance was
+radiant with what he couldn't tell her as a sub-editor of honour
+about those cruel prejudices, but he gave it no other medium.
+
+"I'm afraid you know the world, Miss Howe," he said, with a noble
+reserve, and that was all.
+
+"A corner of it here and there.  But you are responsible for the
+whole of the dramatic criticism,"--Hilda charged him roundly,--"the
+editor can't claim any of THAT."
+
+An inquiring brown face under an embroidered cap appeared at the
+door; a brown hand thrust in a bunch of printed slips.  Mr.
+Sinclair motioned both away, and they vanished in silence.
+
+"That I can't deny," he said.  "It would be useless if I wished to
+do so--my style betrays me--I must plead guilty.  It is not one of
+my legitimate duties--if I held this position on the Times, or say
+the Daily Telegraph, our London contemporaries, it would not be
+required of me.  But in this country everything is piled upon the
+sub-editor.  Many a night, Miss Howe, I send down the last slips of
+a theatre notice at midnight and am here in this chair"--Mr.
+Sinclair brought his open palm down upon the arm of it--"by eleven
+the following day!"  Mr. Sinclair's chin was thrust passionately
+forward, moisture dimmed the velvety brightness of those eyes
+which, in more dramatic moments, he confessed to have inherited
+from a Nawab great-grandfather.  "But I don't complain," he said,
+and drew in his chin.  It seemed to bring his argument to a climax,
+over which he looked at Hilda in warm, frank expansion.
+
+"Overworked, too, I daresay," she said, and then went on a trifle
+hurriedly.  "Well, I must tell you, Mr. Sinclair, how kind your
+criticism always is, and how much I personally appreciate it.  None
+of the little points and effects one tries to make seem to escape
+you, and you are always generous in the matter of space too."
+
+Molyneux impartially threw out his hand.  "I believe in it!" he
+exclaimed.  "Honour where honour is due, Miss Howe, and the
+Stanhope Company has given me some very enjoyable evenings.  And
+you'll hardly believe me, but it is a fact, I assure you, I seldom
+get a free hand with those notices.  Suicidal to the interests of
+the paper as it is, the editor insists as often as not on cutting
+down my theatre copy!"
+
+"Cuts it down, does he?  The brute!" said Miss Howe.
+
+"I've known him sacrifice a third of it for an indigo market
+report.  Now, I ask you, who reads an indigo market report?
+Nobody.  Who wants to know how Jimmy Finnigan's--how the Stanhope
+Company's latest novelties went off?  Everybody.  Of course, when
+he does that sort of thing, I make it warm for him next morning?"
+
+The door again opened and admitted a harassed little Babu in
+spectacles, bearing a sheaf of proof slips, who advanced timidly
+into the middle of the room and paused.
+
+"In a few minutes, Babu," said Mr. Sinclair; "I am engaged."
+
+"It iss the Council isspeech of the Legal Member, sir, and it iss
+to go at five p.m. to his house for last correction."
+
+"Presently, Babu.  Don't interrupt.  As I was saying, Miss Howe, I
+make it warm for him till he apologises.  I must say he always
+apologises, and I don't often ask more than that.  But I was
+obliged to tell him the last time that if it happened again one of
+us would have to go."
+
+"What did he say to that?"
+
+"I don't exactly remember.  But it had a tremendous effect--
+tremendous.  We became good friends almost immediately."
+
+"Quite so.  We miss you when you don't come, Mr. Sinclair--last
+Saturday night, for example."
+
+"I HAD to go to the Surprise Party.  Jimmy came here with tears in
+his eyes that morning.  'My show is tumbling to pieces,' he said.
+'Sinclair, you've got to come to-night.'  Made me dine with him--
+wouldn't let me out of his sight.  We had to send a reporter to you
+and Llewellyn that night."
+
+"Mr. Sinclair, the notice made me weep."
+
+"I know.  All that about the costumes.  But what can you expect?
+The man is as black as your hat."
+
+"We have to buy our own costumes," said Hilda, with a glance at the
+floor, "and we haven't any too much, you know, to do it on."
+
+"The toilets in Her Second Son were simply magnificent.  Not to be
+surpassed on the boards of the Lyceum in tasteful design or
+richness of material.  They were ne plus ultra!" cried Mr.
+Sinclair.  "You will remember I said so in my critique."
+
+"I remember.  If I were you I wouldn't go so far another time.
+There's a lot of cotton velvet and satin about it, you know,
+between ourselves, and Finnigan's people will be getting the laugh
+on us.  That's one of the things I wanted to mention.  Don't be
+quite so good to us.  See?  Otherwise--well, you know how Calcutta
+talks, and what a pretty girl Beryl Stace is, for example.  Mrs.
+Sinclair mightn't like it, and I don't blame her."
+
+"As I said before, Miss Howe, you know the world," Mr. Sinclair
+replied, with infinite mellow humour, and as Miss Howe had risen he
+rose too, pulling down his waistcoat.
+
+"There was just one other thing," Hilda said, holding out her hand.
+"Next Wednesday, you know, Rosa Norton takes her benefit.  Rosy's
+as well known here as the Ochterlony monument; she's been coming
+every cold weather for ten years, poor old Rosy.  Don't you think
+you could do her a bit of an interview for Wednesday's paper?
+She'll write up very well--get her on variety entertainments in the
+Australian bush."
+
+Mr. Molyneux Sinclair looked pained to hesitate.  "Personally," he
+said confidentially, "I should like it immensely, and I daresay I
+could get it past the editor.  But we're so short-handed."
+
+Miss Howe held up a forefinger which seemed luminous with solution.
+"Don't you bother," she said, "I'll do it for you; I'll write it
+myself.  My 'prentice hand I'll try on Rosy, and you shall have the
+result ready to print on Tuesday morning.  Will that do?"
+
+That would do supremely.  Mr. Sinclair could not conceal the
+admiration he felt for such a combination of talents.  He did not
+try; he accompanied it to the door, expanding and expanding until
+it seemed more than ever obvious that he found the sub-editorial
+sphere unreasonably contracted.  Hilda received his final bow from
+the threshold of what he called his "sanctum," and had hardly left
+the landing in descent when a square-headed, collarless, red-faced
+male in shirt sleeves came down, descending, as it seemed, in
+bounds from parts above.  "Damn it, Sinclair!" she heard, as he
+shot into the apartment she had left, "here's the whole council
+meeting report set up and waiting three-quarters of an hour--press
+blocked; and the printer Babu says he can get nothing out of you.
+What the devil . . .  If the dak's* missed again, by thunder! . . .
+paid to converse with itinerant females . . . seven columns . . .
+infernal idiocy" . . .
+
+
+* Country post.
+
+
+Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with amusement
+as she made her way down that Mr. Sinclair was doubtless waiting
+until his lady visitor was well out of earshot to make it warm for
+the editor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything
+very exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged
+themselves between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the
+Reverend Stephen Arnold, had it been aware of them; and I conclude
+reluctantly that it would not.  Reluctantly, because such
+imperviousness argues a lack of perception, of flair in directions
+which any Continental centre would recognise as vastly tickling,
+regrettable in a capital of such vaunted sophistication as that
+which sits beside the Hooghly.  It may as well be shortly admitted,
+however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you must, for
+example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty technical
+equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from
+England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of
+your dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit.  For the sex
+that does not hunt jackals it is easier--you have only to be a
+little frivolous and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-
+shaking nickname, as in the case of three ladies known in a
+viceroyalty of happy legend as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
+I should be sorry to give the impression that Calcutta is therefore
+a place of gloom.  The source of these things is perennial, and the
+noise of laughter is ever in the air of the Indian capital.
+Between the explosions, however, it is natural enough that the
+affairs of a priest of College Street and an actress of no address
+at all should slip unnoticed, especially as they did not advertise
+it.  Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was no
+rehearsal, to tea.  He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts
+which answered fairly well the purposes of a sense of humour, and
+nobody could question hers; it operated obscurely to keep them in
+the house.
+
+She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her
+to take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of
+beauty; although she mentioned to herself that he took it with a
+difference, a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of
+not having yet quite sounded.  The depths of his faith of course--
+there she could only scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon
+which she did not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he
+sometimes gently guided her.  The atmospheres of their talk were
+the more bracing ones of this world, and it was here that Hilda
+looked when she would make him a parallel for Lindsay, and here
+that she found her measure of disappointment.  He warmed himself
+and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and she was not
+on the whole the poorer by any exchange they made, but she was
+sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between
+them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the
+flavour of adventure.  She found herself inclined--and the
+experience was new--to make an effort for a reward which was
+problematical and had to be considered in averages, a reward put
+out in a thin and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a
+curious concentrated quality, and a strange flavour of incense and
+the air of cold churches.  There was also the impression--was it
+too fantastic?--of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire
+which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way.  Duff
+Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with
+open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to
+one's idea.  But the comparison was irritating, and after a time
+she turned from it.  She awoke once in the night, moreover, to
+declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration
+of Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be--one
+hardly paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection
+which would certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear
+Duff.  With regard to Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course,
+another way of saying that she was less oppressed, in his company,
+by the consideration of her own.  Perhaps it is already evident
+that this was her grievance with life, when the joy of it left her
+time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her personal lines,
+the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of her and
+found her willing to perform, the fact that it meant more to her,
+for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she
+got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view
+except the biological.  She had no heroic quarrel with these
+conditions--her experience had not been upon that plane--but she
+bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading;
+one came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains.
+It was absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman
+kind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially
+subjected.  So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour,
+and so interfering--so horribly interfering!  Personally she did
+not see herself one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her
+defences; but the necessity of using them was matter for complaint
+when existence might have been so delightful a boon without it,
+full of affinities and communities in every direction.  She had
+not, I am convinced, any of the notions of a crusader upon this
+popular subject, nor may I portray her either shocked or revolted,
+only rather bored, being a creature whom it was unkind to hamper;
+and she would have explained quite in these simple terms the reason
+why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament was to her a
+pervasive charm of his society.
+
+She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not
+classify him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and
+there was in this no doubt a vague perception that the confession
+showed a limitation of experience on her part for which he might be
+inclined to call her to account; since cultured young Oxonians with
+an altruistic bias, if they do not exactly abound, are still often
+enough to be discovered if one happens to belong to the sphere
+which they haunt, they and their ideals.  Not that any such
+consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the disabilities of
+her own.  She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching her lips,
+and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance
+following her into its queer byways--her sphere's--full of spangles
+and limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival
+artistry.  There was a fascination in bringing him out of his
+remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to
+what he might do.  This remained ungratified, for he never did
+anything.  He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs
+possible, that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and
+she in the picturesque tangle outside found it enough.
+
+He was there when she came back from the Chronicle office, patient
+under the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had
+told him she would not be long in returning.  He had gone so far as
+to order tea for her, and it was waiting with him.  "Make it," she
+commanded; "why haven't you had some already?" and while he bent
+over the battered Britannia metal spout she sank into the nearest
+seat and let her hat make a frame for her face against the back of
+it.  She was too tired, she said, to move, and her hands lay
+extended, one upon each arm of her chair, with the air of being
+left there to be picked up at her convenience.  Arnold, over the
+teapot, agreed that walking in Calcutta was an insidious pleasure--
+one gathered a lassitude--and brought her cup.  She looked at him
+for an instant as she took it.
+
+"But I am not too tired to hear what you have on your mind," she
+said.  "Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his
+convictions?  Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the
+roof after all?"
+
+"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I
+don't think I should tell you if they were so.  But they're not.
+Kally Nath is to be baptized to-morrow.  We are certain to get our
+oratory."
+
+"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted.  "When one prays for so long a
+time together it must be better to have fresh air.  It will
+certainly be better for Brother Colquhoun.  He seems to have such a
+weak chest."
+
+"It will be better for us all."  Arnold seemed to reflect, across
+his teacup, how much better it would be.  Then he added, "I saw
+Lindsay last night."
+
+"Again?  And--"
+
+"I think it is perfectly hopeless.  I think he is making way."
+
+"Sickening!  I hoped you would not speak to him again.  After all--
+another man--it's naturally of no use!"
+
+"I spoke as a priest!"
+
+"Did he swear at you?"
+
+"Oh dear no!  He was rather sympathetic.  And I went very far.  But
+I could get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."
+
+"How far did you go?"
+
+"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit
+sacrilege.  He seemed to think he could make it up to her."
+
+"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you
+don't suspect the irony in it" Hilda said.  "Pray who is to make it
+up to him?"
+
+"I suppose there is that point of view."
+
+"I should think so, indeed!  But taking it, I despair with you.
+I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of
+her appear before him.  I succeeded too--he gave me the most
+uncomfortable looks--but I might as well have let it alone.
+The great end of nature," Hilda went on, putting down her cup,
+"reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend
+themselves to.  So she invents these temporary insanities.  And
+therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.
+That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's irresistibly
+suggested."
+
+Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of
+the room.  The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion,
+the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his
+mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's
+substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and
+he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a
+statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to
+characterise it at all.  He looked at the wall as if, being a solid
+and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm--it was really
+something like that--which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought
+him.
+
+"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it.  He
+seemed determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful.  I fancied
+she was being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through.
+Indeed, I wasn't sure that there was any great temptation.
+Somebody must be helping him."
+
+"The devil, no doubt," Hilda replied concisely; "and with equal
+certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."
+
+Arnold gave her a look of surprise.  "Surely not my cousin!" he
+protested.  "She can't understand."
+
+"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER!  I think she understands.  I
+think she's only too tortuously intelligent."
+
+Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence.  "May I ask?--" he
+began, formally.
+
+"Oh yes!  It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so
+exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love
+with Mr. Lindsay herself.  It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it,
+to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?" she went
+on, at Arnold's blush; "but you asked me, you know.  And she is
+making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about.  I
+think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl--having her
+there constantly and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of
+what she is so possessed to throw away.  People in Alicia's
+condition have no sense of immorality."
+
+"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest
+in his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was
+not quite a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication
+between Alicia and Lindsay.  He sat for a moment without saying
+more, covering his eyes with his hand.
+
+"Why should you care so much?" Hilda asked gently.  "You are at the
+very antipodes of her sect.  You can't endorse her methods--you
+don't trust her results."
+
+"Oh, all that!  It's of the least consequence."  He spoke with a
+curious, governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes.
+"It's seeing another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that
+held, as best it could, a ray from the source.  It's another
+glimpse of the strength of the tide--terrible.  It's a cruel hint
+that one lives above it in the heaven of one's own hopes, by some
+mere blind accident.  To have set one's feeble hand to the
+spiritualising of the world and to feel the possibility of that--"
+
+"I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did.  But his words oppressed
+her.  She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and
+went to a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat.  She was
+refreshed and vivified--she wanted to talk of the warm world.  She
+let a decent interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his
+hand from his eyes.  Even then, to make the transition easier, she
+said, "You ought to be lifted up to-day, if you are going to
+baptize Kally Nath to-morrow."
+
+"The Brother Superior will do it.  And I don't know--I don't know.
+The young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes
+over to us--"
+
+"The, young woman he is to marry!  Oh my dear and reverend friend!
+Avec ces gens la!  I have had a most amusing afternoon," she went
+on quickly.  "I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your
+halo."  She was safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at
+any imputation of saintship.  He held himself a person of broad
+indulgences, and would point openly to his consumption of tea-
+cakes.  But this afternoon a miasma hung over him.  Hilda saw it,
+and bent herself, with her graphic recital, to dispel it, perceived
+it thicken and settle down upon him, and went bravely on to the
+end.  Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and spoke
+before him.  It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a
+matinee.
+
+"And that is the sort of thing you store up and value," he said,
+when she had finished.  "These persons will add to your knowledge
+of life?"
+
+"Extremely," she replied to all of it.
+
+"I suppose they will in their measure.  But personally I could wish
+you had not gone.  Your work has no right to make such demands."
+
+"Be reasonable," she said, flushing.  "Don't talk as if personal
+dignity were within the reach of everybody.  It's the most
+expensive of privileges.  And nothing to be so very proud of--
+generally the product of somebody else's humiliations, handed down.
+But the humiliations must have been successful, handed down in
+cash.  My father drove a cab and died in debt.  His name was
+Cassidy.  I shall be dignified some day--some day!  But you see I
+must make it possible myself, since nobody has done it for me."
+
+"Well, then, I'll alter my complaint.  Why should you play with
+your sincerity?"
+
+"I didn't play with it," she flashed; "I abandoned it.  I am an
+actress."
+
+They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance
+their discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain
+that Arnold was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves.  He
+fidgeted with the tassel of his ceinture, and she watched his
+moving fingers.  Presently she spoke quietly, in a different key.
+
+"I sometimes think," she said, "of a child I knew, in the other
+years.  She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts.  Her
+impulses, within her small limits, were noble--she was the keenest,
+loyalest little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her.
+When I look at the woman she is now I think the uses of life are
+hard, my friend--they are hard."
+
+He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as
+an illustration.
+
+"And yet," he replied, "they can be turned to admirable purpose."
+
+"I wonder!" Hilda exclaimed brightly.  She had turned down the leaf
+of that mood.  "But we are not cheerful--let us be cheerful.  For
+my part I am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of
+December.  Look at this!"
+
+She opened a small black leather bag, and poured money out of it,
+in notes and currency, into her lap.
+
+"Is it a legacy?"
+
+"It's pay," she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips.  "I
+have been paid--we have all been paid!  It's so unusual--it makes
+me feel quite generous.  Let me see.  I'll give you this, and this,
+and this,"--she counted into her open palm ten silver rupees,--"all
+those I will give you for your mission.  Prends!" and she clinked
+them together and held them out to him.
+
+He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small.  Something
+in him had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood.
+He could only draw into his shell; doubtless he thought that a
+legitimate and inoffensive proceeding.
+
+"Thanks, no," he said, "I think not.  We desire people's prayers,
+rather than their alms."
+
+He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous
+behaviour, and said farewell to him as she always did, in spite of
+the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes.  She continued to
+hold the ten rupees carefully and separately, as if she would later
+examine them in diagnosing her pain.  It was keener and profounder
+than any humiliation, the new voice, crying out, of a trampled
+tenderness.  She stood and looked after him for a moment with
+startled eyes and her hand, in a familiar gesture of her
+profession, upon her heart.  Then she went to her room, and
+deliberately loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed, first
+to sob like that little child she remembered, and afterwards to
+think, until the world came and knocked at her door and bade her
+come out of herself and earn money.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+The compulsion which took Stephen Arnold to Crooked Lane is hardly
+ours to examine.  It must have been strong, since going up to Mrs.
+Sand involved certain concessions, doubtless intrinsically
+trifling, but of exaggerated discomfort to the mind spiritually
+cloistered, whatever its other latitude.  Among them was a
+distinctly necessary apology, difficult enough to make to a lady of
+rank so superior and authority so voyant in the Church militant, by
+a mere fighting soul without such straps and buttons as might
+compel recognition upon equal terms.  It is impossible to know how
+far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty--the priestly horizon is
+perhaps not wholly free from mirage--or to what extent he confessed
+it an indulgence.  He was certainly aware of a stronger desire than
+he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not
+desert her post.  The idea had an element of irritation oddly
+personal; he could not bear to reflect upon it.  It may be wondered
+whether in any flight of venial imagination Arnold saw himself in a
+parallel situation with a lady.  I am sure he did not.  It may be
+considered, however, that among mirages there are unaccountable
+resemblances--resemblances without shape or form.  He might fix his
+gaze, at all events, upon the supreme argument that those who were
+given to holy work, under any condition, in any degree, should make
+no rededication of themselves.  This had to support him as best it
+could against the conviction that had Captain Filbert been Sister
+Anastasia, for example, of the Baker Institution, and Ensign Sand
+the Mother Superior of its Calcutta branch, it was improbable that
+he would have ventured to announce his interest in the matter by
+his card, or in any other way.
+
+It was a hesitating step, therefore, that carried him up to the
+quarters, and a glance of some nervous distress that made him
+aware, as he stood bowing upon her threshold, clasping with both
+hands his soft felt hat to his breast, that Mrs. Sand was not
+displeased to see him.  She hastened, indeed, to give him a chair;
+she said she was very glad he'd dropped in, if he didn't mind the
+room being so untidy--where there were children you could spend the
+whole day picking up.  They were out at present, with Captain Sand,
+in the perambulator, not having more servants than they could help.
+A sweeper and a cook they did with; it would surprise the people in
+this country, who couldn't get along with less than twenty, she
+often said.
+
+Mrs. Sand's tone was casual; her manner had a quality somewhat
+aggressively democratic.  It said that under her welcome lay the
+right to criticise, which she would have exercised with equal
+freedom had her visitor been the Lord Bishop John Calcutta himself;
+and it made short work of the idea that she might be over-gratified
+to receive Holy Orders in any form.  She was not unwilling, however,
+to show, as between Ensign and man, reasonable satisfaction;
+presently, in fact, she went so far as to say, still vaguely
+remarking upon his appearance there, that she often thought there
+ought to be more sociability between the different religious
+bodies; it would be better for the cause.  There was nothing
+narrow, she said, about her, nor yet about Captain Sand.  And then,
+with the distinct intimation that that would do, that she had gone
+far enough, she crossed her hands in her lap and waited.  It became
+her to have it understood that this visit need have no further
+object than an exchange of amiabilities; but there might be
+another, and Mrs. Sand's folded hands seemed to indicate that she
+would not necessarily meet it with opposition.
+
+Stephen made successive statements of assent.  He sat grasping his
+hat between his knees, his eyes fixed upon an infant's sock which
+lay upon the floor immediately in front of him, looking at Mrs.
+Sand as seldom and as briefly as possible, as if his glance took
+rather an unfair advantage, which he would spare her.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said.  "Yes, certainly," revolving his hat in his
+hands.  And when she spoke of the fraternity that might be fostered
+by such visits, he looked for an instant as if he had found an
+opening, which seemed, however, to converge and vanish in Mrs.
+Sand's folded hands.  He flushed to think afterwards, that it was
+she who was obliged to bring his resolution to a head, her scent of
+his embarrassment sharpening her curiosity.
+
+"And is there anything we Army officers can do for you, Mr.
+Arnold?" she inquired.
+
+There was a hint in her voice that, whatever it was, they would
+have done it more willingly if she had not been obliged to ask.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, "my mission is not quite so simple.  I
+could wish it were.  It is so easy to show our poor needs to one
+another; and I should have confidence--"  He paused, amazed at the
+duplicity that grinned at him in his words.  At what point more
+remote within the poles was he likely to show himself with a
+personal request?
+
+"I have nothing to ask for myself," he went on, with concentration
+almost harsh.  "I am here to see if you will consent to speak with
+me about a matter which threatens your--your community--about your
+possible loss of Miss Filbert."
+
+Mrs. Sand looked blank.  "The Captain isn't leavin' us, as far as I
+know," she said.
+
+"Oh--is it possible that you are not aware that--that very strong
+efforts are being made to induce her to do so?"
+
+Mrs. Sand looked about her as if she expected to find an
+explanation lying somewhere near her chair.  Light came to her
+suddenly, and brought her a conscious smile; it only lacked force
+to be a giggle.  She glanced at her lap as she smiled; her air was
+deprecating and off-putting, as if she had detected in what Arnold
+said some suggestion of a gallant nature aimed at herself.
+Happily, he was not looking.
+
+"You mean Mr. Lindsay!" she exclaimed, twisting her wedding-ring
+and its coral guard.
+
+"I hope--I beg--that you will not think me meddlesome or
+impertinent.  I have the matter very much at heart.  It seems to
+lie in my path.  I must see it.  Surely you perceive some way of
+averting the disaster in it!"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what you refer to."  Mrs. Sand's tone was
+prudish and offended.  "She hasn't said a word to me--she's a great
+one for keeping things to herself--but if Mr. Lindsay don't mean
+marriage with her--"
+
+"Why, of course!"  Arnold, startled, turned furiously red, but Mrs.
+Sand in her indignation did not reflect the tint.  "Of course!  Is
+not that," he went on after an instant's pause, "precisely what is
+to be lamented--and prevented?"
+
+Mrs. Sand looked at her visitor with dry suspicion.  "I suppose you
+are a friend of his," she said.
+
+"I have known him for years.  Pray don't misunderstand me.  There
+is nothing against him--nothing whatever."
+
+"Oh, I don't suppose there is, except that he is not on the Lord's
+side.  But I don't expect any of his friends are anxious for him to
+marry an officer in the Salvation Army.  Society people ain't fond
+of the Army, and never will be."
+
+"His people--he has only distant relatives living--are all at
+home," Stephen said vaguely.  The situation had become slightly
+confused.
+
+"Then you speak for them, I suppose?"
+
+"Indeed not.  I am in no communication with them whatever.  I fancy
+they know nothing about it.  I am here entirely--ENTIRELY of my own
+accord.  I have come to place myself at your disposition if there
+is anything I can do, any word I can say, to the end of preventing
+this catastrophe in a spiritual life so pure and devoted; to ask
+you at all events to let me join my prayers to yours that it shall
+not come about."
+
+The squalor of the room seemed to lift before his eyes and be
+suffused with light.  At last he had made himself plain.  But Mrs.
+Sand was not transfigured.  She seemed to sit, with her hands
+folded, in the midst of a calculation.
+
+"Then he HAS put the question.  I told her he would," she said.
+
+"I believe he has asked her to marry him and she has refused, more
+than once.  But he is importunate, and I hear she needs help."
+
+"Mr. Lindsay," said Mrs. Sand, "is a very takin' young man."
+
+"I suppose we must consider that.  There is position too, and
+wealth.  These things count--we are all so human--even against the
+Divine realities into possession of which Miss Filbert must have so
+perfectly entered."
+
+"I thought he must be pretty well off.  Would he be one of them
+Government officials?"
+
+"He is a broker."
+
+"Oh, is he indeed?"  Mrs. Sand's enlightenment was evidently
+doubtful.  "Well, if they get married Captain Filbert 'll have to
+resign.  It's against the regulations for her to marry outside of
+the Army."
+
+"But is she not vowed to her work; isn't her life turned for ever
+into that channel?  Would it not be horrible to you to see the
+world interfere?"
+
+"I won't say but what I'd be sorry to see her leave us.  But I
+wouldn't stand in her way either, and neither would Captain Sand."
+
+"Stand in her way!  In her way to material luxury, poverty of
+spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral
+mediocrity of the world.  I would to God I could be that stumbling
+block!  I have heard her--I have seen the light in her that may so
+possibly be extinguished."
+
+"I don't deny she has a kind of platform gift, but she's losin' her
+voice.  And she doesn't understand briskin' people up, if you know
+what I mean."
+
+"She will be pulled down--she will go under!" Arnold repeated in
+the depths of his spirit.  He stood up, fumbling with his hat.
+Mrs. Sand and her apartment, her children out of doors in the
+perambulator, and the whole organisation to which she appertained
+had grown oppressive and unnecessary.  He was aware of a desire to
+put his foot again in his own world, where things were seen, were
+understood.  He thought there might be solace in relating the
+affair to Brother Colquhoun.
+
+"It's a case," said Mrs. Sand judicially, "where I wouldn't think
+myself called on to say one word.  Such things everyone has a right
+to decide for themselves.  But you oughtn't to forget that a
+married woman"--she looked at Arnold's celibate habit as if to hold
+it accountable for much--"can have a great influence for good over
+him that she chooses.  I am pretty sure Captain Filbert's already
+got Mr. Lindsay almost persuaded.  I shouldn't be at all surprised
+if he joined the Army himself when she's had a good chance at him."
+
+Arnold put on his hat with a groan, and began the descent of the
+stairs.  "Good-afternoon then," Mrs. Sand called out to him from
+the top.  He turned mechanically and bared his head.  "I beg your
+pardon," he said.  "Good-afternoon."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Mrs. Sand found it difficult to make up her mind upon several
+points touching the visit of the Reverend Stephen Arnold.  Its
+purport, of which she could not deny her vague appreciation, drew a
+cloud across a rosy prospect, and in this light his conduct showed
+unpardonable; on the other hand it implied a compliment to the
+corps, it made the spiritual position of an officer of the Army, a
+junior too, a matter of moment in a wider world than might be
+suspected; and before this consideration Mrs. Sand expanded.  She
+reflected liberally that salvation was not necessarily frustrated
+by the laying-on of hands; she had serene fancies of a republic of
+the redeemed.  She was a prey to further hesitations regarding the
+expediency of mentioning the interview to Laura, and as private and
+confidential it ministered for two days to her satisfactions of
+superior officer.  In the end, however, she had to sacrifice it to
+the girl's imperturbable silence.  She chose an intimate and a
+private hour, and shut the door carefully upon herself and her
+captain, but she had not at all decided, when she sat down on the
+edge of the bed, what complexion to give to the matter, nor had she
+a very definite idea, when she got up again, of what complexion she
+had given it.  Laura, from the first word, had upset her by an
+intense eagerness, a determination not to lose a syllable.  Captain
+Filbert insisted upon hearing all before she would acknowledge
+anything; she hung upon the sentences Mrs. Sand repeated, and
+joined them together as if they were parts of a puzzle; she finally
+had possession of the conversation much as I have already written
+it down.  As Mrs. Sand afterward told her husband, Miss Filbert sat
+there growing whiter and whiter, more and more worked up, and it
+was impossible to take any comfort in talking to her.  It seemed as
+if she, the Ensign, might save herself the trouble of giving an
+opinion one way or the other, and not a thing could she get the
+girl to say except that it was true enough that the gentleman
+wanted to marry her, and she was ashamed of having let it go so
+far.  But she would never do it--never!  She declared she would
+write to this Mr. Arnold and thank him, and ask him to pray for
+her, "and she as much as ordered me to go and do the same,"
+concluded Mrs. Sand, with an inflection which made its own comment
+upon such a subversion of discipline.
+
+Stephen, under uncomfortable compulsion, sent Laura's letter--she
+did write--to Lindsay.  "I cannot allow you to be in the dark about
+what I am doing in the matter," he explained; "though if I had not
+this necessity for writing you might reasonably complain of an
+intrusive and impertinent letter.  But I must let you know that she
+has appealed to me, and that as far as I can I will help her."
+
+Duff read both communications--Laura's to the priest was brief and
+very technical--between the business quarters of Ralli Brothers and
+the Delhi and London Bank, with his feet in the opposite seat of
+his office-gharry and his forehead puckered by an immediate
+calculation forward in rupee paper.  His irritation spoiled his
+transaction--there was a distinct edge in the manager's manner when
+they parted, and it was perhaps a pardonable weakness that led him
+to dash in blue pencil across the page covered with Arnold's minute
+handwriting, "Then you have done with pasty compromises--you have
+gone over to the Jesuits.  I congratulate you," and readdressed the
+envelope to College Street.  The brown tide of the crowd brought
+him an instant messenger, and he stood in the doorway for a moment
+afterwards frowning upon the yellow turbans that swung along in the
+sunlight against the white wall opposite, across the narrow
+commercial road.  The flame of his indignation set forth his
+features with definiteness and relief, consuming altogether the
+soft amused well-being which was nearly always there.  His lips set
+themselves together, and Mrs. Sand would have been encouraged in
+any scheme of practical utility by the lines that came about his
+mouth.  A brother in finance of some astuteness, who saw him
+scramble into his gharry, divined that with regard to a weighty
+matter in jute mill shares pending, Lindsay had decided upon a
+coup, and made his arrangements accordingly.  He also went upon his
+way with a fresh impression of Lindsay's undeniable good looks, as
+sometimes in a coin new from the mint one is struck with the beauty
+of a die dulled by use and familiarity.
+
+Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel
+distress, but when he had read it, that emotion was lightened in
+him by another sentiment.
+
+"A community admirable in many ways," he murmured, refolding the
+page.  "Does he think he is insulting me?"
+
+Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was
+inclined to concede to Stephen's intermediary, he was compelled to
+recognise without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of
+her profession, had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of
+defensive operations.  She retired effectively, the quarters in
+Crooked Lane became her fortified retreat, whence she issued only
+under escort and upon service strictly obligatory.  Succour from
+Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and Lindsay felt it an
+anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back
+upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to
+assault her position.  Nor could Alicia induce any sortie to
+Middleton Street.  Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and
+luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in
+reticence and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal
+excuse.  They loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss
+Livingstone's shoulders, these notes which bore so much the
+atmosphere of Crooked Lane, and at the same time they formed the
+indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh
+upon her conscience.  She saw it, holding them at arm's length, in
+enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful,
+taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God bless you, yours
+truly," at the end.  They were all there, aridly complete, the
+limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind
+himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through
+which tiniest hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other
+side.  When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten
+years hence attached to the body of this petrification, she was
+almost disposed to abandon the pair, to let them take their
+wretched chance.  But this was a climax which did not occur often;
+she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by
+which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to
+encumber.  The new French poet, the American novelist of the year,
+and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table many days
+together for this reason.  She sometimes remembered what she
+expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what
+profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to
+whether her expectations were fulfilled.  She discovered herself
+intellectually jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to
+daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and
+gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days.
+She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside
+of it.  At all events she took a line; the new Arab was typical,
+and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with
+the idea that she was making a physical fight.  Life might weigh
+one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always
+measure the strength of one's pinions against these things.  She
+made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her
+impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the
+foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them.  She stripped
+her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept
+from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in.  If this
+gave hers a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there
+was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be.  The
+result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate
+hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the
+process.  We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was
+derivable from her continued reception of Duff's confidences--
+it has long been evident that he found her persuadable--her
+unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the analytic
+turn we may almost suppose it.  Starvation is so monotonous a
+misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend
+attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be
+permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept
+conventional enough.  She did not even abate the usual number of
+Duff's invitations to dinner when there was certainly nothing to
+repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver,
+and a tide of conversation about the season's paper-chasing, except
+the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in
+Bentinck Street, desirous and unsatisfied.
+
+It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this
+respect, for it was eventually after one of these parties that
+Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the
+hall the usual whisky and soda, found it necessary instead to give
+him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and
+authoritatively to bed.  Lindsay was very well content to submit;
+he confessed to fever off and on for four or five days past, and
+while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone
+gave him an elbows up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house
+of a friend was better than a shelf at the club.
+
+The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of
+the hall in Crooked Lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of
+these exercises.  The world shrank, for Laura, to the compass of
+the kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against
+which she must key herself to indifference.  When on the second and
+third evening she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her
+that either she or Mr. Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she
+offered up thanks.  On the fourth she reflected recurrently and
+anxiously that it was not after all a very glorious victory if the
+devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the
+opportunities that had been his, should slip back without profit to
+the level from which she had striven--they had all striven--to lift
+him.  Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations,
+sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own
+account and obtained information.
+
+Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the
+circumstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which
+Mrs. Barberry came for hours to take advantage of.  There were the
+usual two nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the
+Arab farther afield than ever, and she did.  One can imagine her
+cantering fast and far with a sense of conscious possession in
+spite of Mrs. Barberry and the two nurses.  There may be a certain
+solace in the definite and continuous knowledge available about a
+person hovering on the brink of enteric under your own roof-tree.
+It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major Livingstone could not make
+up his mind.  Alicia knew only of this uncertainty; other
+satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs. Barberry.
+She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so uniformly
+cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from
+Lindsay's room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the
+temperature was the same, hadn't budged a point, must manage to get
+it down somehow in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to
+envelop himself in the newspapers.  Those arbitrary and obstinate
+figures, which stood for apprehension to the most casual ear,
+stamped themselves on most things as the day wore on, and at tea-
+time Mrs. Barberry gave her other details, thinking her rather cold
+in the reception of them.  But she plainly preferred to be out of
+it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a
+glance at the boiled milk preparations of the butler.  "And you
+know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these people have to be
+watched."  To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be
+solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy.  There
+was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct
+as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either
+by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her
+right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously
+when it has been given in the highest to somebody else.  These
+pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but
+they did not take the importance of motives.  She rather stood
+aside with folded hands, and in an infinite terror of prejudicing
+fate, devoured her heart by way of keeping its beating normal.
+Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final alternative to Lindsay's
+marriage, one can imagine her forcing herself to look at it.
+
+Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing
+Lindsay's room, for her own lay beyond it.  In the seven o'clock
+half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she
+went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a
+veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly
+asleep.  "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly
+up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert's face.
+Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the
+direction of her skirts.  She stood silent, stricken in the dusk
+with astonishment, but the sense that was strongest in her was
+plainly that of having made a criminal discovery.  Laura stumbled
+upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant, words
+held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door.  Then
+Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the
+servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on,
+a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both.
+It was a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of
+flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony
+crucifix over the bed.  Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix
+afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed
+brushes on the toilet-table.  Across the open window a couple of
+bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden
+cut all its fronds sharply against the light.
+
+"Well?" said Alicia, when the door was shut.
+
+Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.
+
+"I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone
+out.  And the nurse was in the room; I couldn't get to her.  There
+was nobody but the servants about."
+
+"Objection to what?"
+
+"To my being there.  I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay."
+
+"Did you make any noise?"
+
+Miss Filbert looked professionally touched.  "It was silent prayer,
+of course," she said.
+
+Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet-table, had an air of
+eagerness, of successful capture.  The yellow sky in the window
+behind her made filmy lights round her hair, and outlined her tall
+figure, in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped
+effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit.  Laura
+Filbert thought she looked like a princess.
+
+"I seem to hear of nothing but petitions," she said.  "Isn't
+somebody praying for you?"
+
+The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such
+a suggestion.  Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the
+space between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.
+
+"I hope so, miss," she said, and looked as if for calming over
+Alicia's shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky.
+The colour sank back out of her face, and the light from the window
+rested on it ethereally.  The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to
+seek, and their blue seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old
+splendour of the uplifted golden gates rewarded them.
+
+"Why do you use that odious word?" Alicia explained.  "You are not
+my maid!  Don't do it again--don't dream of doing it again!"
+
+"I--I don't know."  The girl was still plainly covered with
+confusion at being found in the house uninvited.  "I suppose I
+forgot.  Well, good-evening," and she turned to the door.
+
+"Don't go," Alicia commanded.  "Don't.  You never come to see me
+now.  Sit down."  She dragged a chair forward and almost pushed
+Laura into it.  "I will sit down too--what am I thinking of?"
+
+Laura reflected for a moment, looking at her folded hands.  "I
+might as well tell you," she said, "that I have not been praying
+that Mr. Lindsay should get better.  Only that he should be given
+time to find salvation and die in Jesus."
+
+"Don't--don't say those things to me.  How light you are--it's
+wicked!" Alicia returned with vehemence, and then as Captain
+Filbert stared, half comprehending, "Don't you care?" she added
+curiously.
+
+It was so casual that it was cruel.  The girl's eyes grew wider
+still during the instant she fixed them upon Alicia in the effort
+of complete understanding.  Then her lip trembled.
+
+"How can I care?" she cried; "how can I?" and burst into weeping.
+She drew her sari over her face and rocked to and fro.  Her dusty
+bare foot protruded from her cotton skirt.  She sat huddled
+together, her head in its coverings sunk between weak shaking
+shoulders.  Alicia considered her for an instant as a pitiable and
+degraded spectacle.  Then she went over and touched her.
+
+"You are completely worn out," she said, "and it is almost dinner-
+time.  The ayah will bring you a hot bath and then you will come
+down and have some food quietly with me.  My brother is dining out
+somewhere.  I will go away for a little while and then I know you
+will feel better.  And after dinner," she added gently, "you may
+come up if you like and pray again for Mr. Lindsay.  I am sure he
+would--"
+
+The faintest break in her own voice warned her, and she hurried out
+of the room.
+
+It was a foolish thing, and the Livingstones' old Karim Bux much
+deplored it, but the miss-sahib had forgotten to give information
+that the dinner of eight commanded a fortnight ago would not take
+place--hence everything was ready in its sequence for this event,
+with a new fashion of stuffing quails and the first strawberries of
+the season from Dinapore.  The feelings of Karim Bux in presenting
+these things to a woman in the dress of a coolie are not important;
+but Alicia, for some reason, seemed to find the trivial incident
+gratifying.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white
+sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a
+flagrant ticca-gharry.  The driver lay extended on the top of it,
+asleep, the syce squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it
+perfunctorily with hay from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind.
+A fringe of palms and ferns in pots ran between the pillars, and
+orchids hung from above, shutting out the garden where heavy scents
+stood in the sun, and mynas chattered on the drive.  The air was
+full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to the lavish energy of
+growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the compound rose
+the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue.  A long
+time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse,
+uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.
+
+Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped
+handkerchief agreeably scented.  The night nurse had realised
+herself equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of
+practical views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept
+from day to day to see her patient fed, and hand him books and
+writing materials.  She had not even the duty of debarring
+visitors, but sat most of the time in the dressing-room where
+echoes fell about her of the stories with which riotous young men,
+in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's convalescence.
+There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in vain, to
+express her views upon such waste of scientific training.  She had
+Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his
+sister's.
+
+There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two
+women in the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated
+these things to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was
+already half disengaged from the subject, her eye wandered as if in
+search for the avenue to another.  By a sudden inclination Alicia
+began the story of Laura Filbert on her knees at Lindsay's door.
+She told it in a quiet, steady, colourless way, pursuing it to the
+end--it came with the ease of frequent private rehearsals--and then
+with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms she stopped
+and gazed meditatively in front of her. There was something in the
+gaze to which Hilda yielded an attention unexpectedly serious,
+something of the absolute in character and life impervious to her
+inquiry.  Yet to analysis it was only the grey look of eyes
+habituated to regard the future with penetration and to find
+nothing there.
+
+"Have you told him?" Hilda asked after an instant's pause, during
+which she conceded something, she hardly knew what; she meant to
+find out later.
+
+"I haven't seen him.  But I will tell him, I promise you."
+
+"I have no doubt you will!  But don't promise ME.  I won't even
+witness the vow!" Hilda cried.
+
+"What does it matter?  I shall certainly tell him."  The words fell
+definitely like pebbles.  Hilda thoughtfully picked them up.
+
+"On the whole," she said, "perhaps it would be as well.  Yes, it is
+my advice.  It is quite likely that he will be revolted.  It may be
+curative."
+
+Alicia turned away her head to hide the faint frown that
+nevertheless crept into her voice.  "I don't think so," she said.
+"How you do juggle with things!  I don't know why I talk to you
+about this--this matter.  I am sure I ought not."
+
+"I was going to say," pursued Hilda, indifferent to her scruple,
+"that I shouldn't be at all surprised if his illness leaves him
+quite emotionally sane.  The poison has worked itself out of his
+blood--perhaps the passion and the poison were the same."
+
+"I wonder!" Alicia said.  She said it mechanically, as the easiest
+comment.
+
+"When I knew you first your speculation would have been more
+active, my dear.  You would have looked into the possibility and
+disputed it.  What has become of your modernity?"
+
+It was the tenderest malice, but it obtained no concessive sign.
+Alicia seemed to weigh it.  "I think I like theories better than
+illustrations," she said in defence.
+
+"One can look at theories as one looks at the sky, but an
+illustration wants a careful point of view.  For this one perhaps
+you are a little near."
+
+"Perhaps," Alicia assented, "I am a little near."  She glanced
+quickly down as she spoke, but when she raised her eyes they were
+dry and clear.
+
+"I can see it better," Hilda went on, with immense audacity, "much
+better."
+
+"Isn't it safer to feel?"
+
+"Jamais de la vie!  The nerves lie always."
+
+They were on the edge of the vortex of the old dispute.  Alicia
+leaned back among the cushions and regarded the other with an
+undecided eye.
+
+"You are not sure," said Hilda, "that you won't ask me, at this
+point, to look at the pictures in that old copy of the Persian
+classic--I forget its lovely name--or inquire what sort of house we
+had last night.  Well, don't be afraid of hurting my feelings.
+Only, you know, between us as between more doubtful people, the
+door must be either open or shut.  I fancy you take cold easily;
+perhaps you had better shut the door."
+
+"Not for worlds," Alicia said, with promptitude.  Then she added,
+rather cleverly, "That would be spoiling my one view of life."
+
+Hilda smiled.  "Isn't there any life where you live?"  She glanced
+round her, at the tapestried elegance of the room, with sudden
+indifference.  "After all," she said, "I don't know what I am
+doing here, in your affairs.  As the world swings no one could be
+more remote from them or you.  I belong to its winds and its
+highways--how have you brought me here, a tramp-actress, to your
+drawing-room?"
+
+Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt.  "Don't go
+away," she said.  Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was
+hardly a foot between them.  She went on with a curious excitement.
+
+"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure
+impulse, you don't know.  One only asks the things that minister--
+one goes and finds and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's
+head under any roof.  What difference does it make?  The only thing
+that counts, that rules, is the chance of seeing something else,
+feeling something more, doing something better."
+
+Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on
+the actress's skirt.  Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary
+movement.  It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action
+of flight.  Then she glanced about her again with a kind of
+appraisement, which ended with Alicia and embraced her.  What she
+realised seemed to urge her, I think, in some weak place of her
+sex, to go on intensely, almost fiercely.
+
+"Everything here is aftermath.  You are a gleaner, Alicia
+Livingstone.  We leave it all over the world for people of taste,
+like you, in the glow of their illusions.  I couldn't make you
+understand our harvest; it is of the broad sun and the sincerity of
+things."
+
+"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said,
+wearing, as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of
+trouble.
+
+But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
+impulse to the end.  "Shall I be quite candid?" she said.  "I find
+the atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."
+
+Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the
+window before she understood.  There was some timidity in her
+glance at Hilda and in her mechanical smile.  "Oh," she said, "I
+see what you mean; and I don't wonder.  I am so literal--I have so
+little imagination."
+
+"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you
+could add up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly.  "You have
+none!"
+
+As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands.
+"At least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried.  "I
+felt you, too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me
+to--to respond properly.  And I can't give you up.  You seem to be
+the one valuable thing that I can have--the only permanent fact
+that is left."
+
+Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort.  "Who said anything
+about giving up?" she interrupted.
+
+"Why, you did!  But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean
+it, if you say so."  She turned the appeal of her face and saw a
+sudden pitiful consideration in Hilda's, and as if it called them
+forth two tears sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her
+delicate head upon her lap.
+
+"Dear thing!  I didn't indeed.  If I meant anything it was that I'm
+overstrung.  I've been horribly harried lately."  She possessed
+herself of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it.  Alicia kept her
+head bent for a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment,
+upon the other woman's shoulder.  Her defences crumbled so utterly
+that Hilda felt guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery.  They sat
+together for a moment or two in silence with only that supervening
+sense of successful aggression between them, and the humiliation
+was Hilda's.  Presently it grew heavy, embarrassing.  Alicia got up
+and began a slow, restless pacing up and down before the alcove
+they sat in.  Hilda watched her--it was a rhythmic progress--and
+when she came near with a sound of brushing silk and a faint
+fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a long breath as
+if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner obtained,
+assimilated.
+
+"Oh yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a
+smile, "I must keep you.  I'll do anything you like to make myself
+more--worth while.  I'll read for the pure idea.  I think I'll take
+up modelling.  There's rather a good man here just now."
+
+"Yes," Hilda assented.  "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling.
+It is most expedient, especially if you marry.  Women who like
+those things sometimes have geniuses for sons.  But for me, so far
+as I count--oh, my dear, do nothing more.  You are already an
+achieved effect--a consummation of the exquisite in every way.
+Generations have been chosen among for you; your person holds the
+inheritance of all that is gracious and tender and discriminating
+in a hundred years.  You are as rare as I am, and if there is
+anything you would take from me, I would make more than one
+exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you have
+for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
+my dear."
+
+"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light
+of satisfaction in her eyes.  The sound of a step came from the
+room overhead, and the light died out.  "And what good do they do
+me?" she cried in soft misery.  "What good do they do me!"
+
+"Considerably less than they ought.  Why aren't you up there now?
+What simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in
+your own house?"
+
+Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side.
+"Oh, hush!" she cried.  "Go on!"
+
+"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you.  The room
+should be full of cool refreshing hints of what you are.  Your
+profile should come between him and the twilight with a scent of
+violets."
+
+"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.
+
+"It IS a plot.  Why quibble about it?  If you smile at him it's a
+plot.  If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme,
+deeper than you perceive--the scheme the universe is built on.  We
+wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we
+had been consulted; we're naturally too scrupulous, but nobody
+asked us.  'Without our aid He did us make,' you know."
+
+"But--deliberately--to go so far!  I couldn't, I couldn't, even if
+I could."
+
+Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the
+back and the end of the sofa.  Her hands drooped in their vigour,
+her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple
+lines.  In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair
+and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might
+have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he
+sometimes thought of wine and death and roses.
+
+"I would go farther," she said, and looked as if some other thing
+charged with sweetness had come before her.
+
+"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success,"
+Alicia faltered.
+
+"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she
+smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her
+eyes and came upon her lips.  Her thought turned inward absently;
+it embraced with sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity,
+obedience.  As if she knew her betrayal already complete, "I wish I
+had such a chance," she said.
+
+"You wish you had such a chance!"
+
+"I didn't mean to tell you--you have enough to do to work out your
+own problem; but--"
+
+She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a
+miser might keep back gold.  She let her secret escape through her
+eyes instead.  She was deliberately radiant and silent.  Alicia
+looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a
+mirage of the Promised Land.
+
+"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Hamilton Bradley."
+
+Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if
+all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to
+make it beautiful.
+
+"How you will hold me to my metier," she said.  "Hamilton Bradley
+has given up trying."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"Then think!  Be clever.  Be very clever."
+
+Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands.  A
+turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than
+usual.  Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers
+and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused
+confirmation for their astonishment.
+
+"Well?" said Hilda.
+
+"I can think of no one--there IS no one--except--oh, it's too
+absurd!  Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"
+
+The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an
+instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable.  Then the light came
+back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.
+
+"I admit the absurdity.  Stephen--poor dear Stephen.  How odd it
+seems," she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--
+like a thing born.  But it is that--a thing born."
+
+"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.
+
+"Neither do I.  I don't indeed.  Sometimes I feel like a creature
+with its feet in a trap.  The insane, insane improbability of it!"
+She laughed again.  It was delicious to hear her.
+
+"But--he is a priest!"
+
+"Much more difficult.  He is a saint."
+
+Alicia glanced at the floor.  The record of another lighter moment
+twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.
+
+"Are you quite certain?" she said.  "You told me once that--that
+there had been other times."
+
+"They are useful, those foolish episodes.  They explain to one the
+difference."  The tone of this was very even, very usual, but
+Alicia was aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of
+aggression, that almost ranged her hostile.  She hurried out of
+that position.
+
+"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarrassment.  "I
+see nothing--nothing REALLY against it."
+
+"I should think not!  Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"
+
+"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of
+curiosity.
+
+"I don't think I can let you ask me that."
+
+"There are such strange things to consider!  Would he withdraw from
+the Church?  Would you retire from the stage?  I don't know which
+seems the more impossible!"
+
+Hilda got up.
+
+"It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?" she said.  "I haven't
+made it out.  And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls
+for redemption, never of me at all."
+
+A servant of the house with the air of a messenger brought Alicia a
+scrap of paper.  She glanced at it, and then, with hands that
+trembled, began folding it together.
+
+"He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair," she murmured,
+"and he wants me to come and talk to him."
+
+"Well," said Hilda.  "Come."
+
+She put her arm about Alicia, and drew her out of the room to the
+foot of the stairs.  They went in silence, saying nothing even when
+they parted, and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend.
+Halfway up she paused and looked down.  Hilda turned to meet her
+glance, and something of primitive puissance passed, conscious,
+comprehended, between the eyes of the two women.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign
+of anything but convalescence.  An appetite to cry out upon, a
+chartered tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands;
+such indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for
+other betrayals.  There had been opportunities--even the day nurse
+had gone, and Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he
+seemed to prefer to talk about the pattern in the carpet, or the
+corpulence of the khansamah, or things in the newspapers.  Alicia,
+once, at a suggestive point, put almost a visible question into a
+silent glance, and Lindsay asked her for some more sugar.  Surgeon-
+Major Livingstone, coming into his office, unexpectedly one
+morning, found his sister in the act of replacing a volume upon its
+professional shelf.  It was somebody on the pathology of Indian
+fevers.  Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve it--only
+technical corroboration.  It might also be considered that,
+although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for
+intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again.  They
+may have heard in Crooked Lane that Duff was better.  We may freely
+imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to
+disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken
+advantage of.  Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified
+repentance; they might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought,
+smiling, to the Archdeacon.
+
+As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay
+still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make,
+was perhaps lacking in essentials.  It would be an experiment of
+some intricacy, it might very probably work out in shades.  So much
+would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much
+reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope
+budding underneath; the key to Hilda's theory might very well be
+lost in contingencies.  Nevertheless, Alicia postponed her story,
+from day to day and from hour to hour.  If her ideas about it--she
+kept them carefully in solution--could have been precipitated, they
+might have appeared in a formula favourite with her brother the
+Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.
+
+She told him finally on the morning of his first drive.  They went
+together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the
+carriage at a demand for him from the hospital.  It was seven
+o'clock, and the morning wind swept soft and warm from over the
+river.  There was a white light on all the stucco parapets, and
+their shadows slanted clear and delicately purple to the west.  The
+dust slept on the broad roads of the Maidan, only a curling trace
+lifted itself here and there at the heel of a cart-bullock, and
+nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the streets that
+knotted themselves in the city.  From the river, curving past the
+statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country people
+with baskets on their heads.  The sun struck a vivid note with the
+red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation,
+in the profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse.  There was the
+completest freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the
+city gathered her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to
+disburden any heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of
+words to any joy that might rebel in prison.  The advantage of the
+intimacy of the landau for purposes of observation was so obvious
+that one imagines Alicia must have been aware of it, though as a
+matter of fact when she finally told Lindsay she did not look at
+him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden Gardens, where the
+yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the morning sky; and
+so lost it.
+
+He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
+question.  On what day precisely?  And how long?  And afterwards?
+The yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as
+the road trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it.  There
+was an endless going round of wheels, and trees passed them in
+mechanical succession; a tree, and another tree; some of them had
+flowers on them.  When he broke the silence afterwards she started
+as if in apprehension, but it was only to say something that
+anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing energy of the
+organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged.  Her assent was little
+and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it.  The Salvation
+Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton, without a suggestive
+bone.
+
+Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
+thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared."  There was
+in it that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man
+finds under pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned
+himself to his invalid's privileges as if he valued them.  He lay
+extended beside her among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look
+at him, and got as far as the hand nearest her, ungloved and
+sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.
+
+"She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only
+that if you died you might be saved first."  Her eyes were still on
+his hand, and she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an
+impulse.  Then they relaxed again, and he said, "Oh, well," and
+smiled at the balancings of a crow drinking at a city conduit.
+
+That was all.  Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to
+postpone her impressions, even her emotions.  In the meantime it
+was something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to
+talk about the commonplaces of the roadside.  In her escape from
+this oppression, she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent
+pleasure in what they saw; everything had in some way the likeness
+of the leafing teak-trees, tender and curative.  In the broad early
+light that lay over the tanks there was a vague allurement, almost
+a presage, and the wide spaces of the Maidan made room for hope.
+She asked Lindsay presently if he would mind driving to the market;
+she wanted some flowers for that night.  I think she wanted some
+flowers for that hour.  Her thought broke so easily into the symbol
+of a rose.
+
+They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink
+and crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared
+houses servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches
+in the sun and were shaved.  Where the street ran into shops there
+was still a shuttered blankness, but here and there a doorkeeper
+yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper
+made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah.  The first
+hoarding in a side street announced the appearance of Miss Hilda
+Howe for one night only as Lady Macbeth, under the kind patronage
+of His Excellency the Viceroy; with Jimmy Finnigan in the close
+proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete
+novelties for the same evening.  It made a cheerful note which
+appealed to them both; it was a pictorial combination, Hilda and
+Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was something of gay
+burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the crumbling plaster
+of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their shoes.
+Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a
+testimony to the difference of her.  In Alicia's smile there was a
+satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of
+things.
+
+The life of the market, the bazar, was all awake and moving.  They
+rolled up through a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the
+moment and abandoned, where the leisurely crowd with calculation
+under its turbans, swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a
+palm-dealer ran out of bounds and made a little grove before the
+stall of the man who sold pith helmets.  The warm air held the
+smell of all sorts of commodities; there was a great hum of small
+transactions, clink of small profits.  "It makes one feel immensely
+practical and acquisitive," Duff said, looking at the loaded
+baskets on the coolies' heads; and he insisted on getting out.  "I
+am dying to buy an enormous number of desirable things very cheap.
+But not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you, nor any ribbons or lace--
+is that good lace, Miss Livingstone?  Nor even a live duck--really
+I am difficult.  We might inquire the price of the duck though."
+
+The sense of being contributive to his holiday satisfaction reigned
+in her.  She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that
+played steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him without her
+sanction, how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being.
+They made their way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so
+many things he wanted to stop before as they went, leaning on his
+stick to examine them and delighting in opportunities for making
+himself quite ridiculous.  The country tobacco-dealer laughed too,
+squatting behind his basket--it was a mad sahib, but not madder
+than the rest; and there was no hurry.  Alicia saw the pink glow of
+the roses beyond, where the sun struck across them over the
+shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach them by degrees.
+They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of climax to the
+hour's experience, and after that she was not entirely sure that
+the day would be as grey as other days.
+
+This was the flood-time of roses, and it was exquisite in the
+flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and
+squares of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones.  Some of
+the stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was
+room only for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the
+velvety Jacks, the rest over-ran the tables and the floor in
+anything that would hold them.  The place rioted with the joy and
+the passion of roses, for buying and selling.  There were other
+flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette, but they had a
+diminished insignificant look in their tied-up bunches beside the
+triumph of the roses.  Farther on, beyond the cage of the money-
+changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their
+vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that where the jostling
+crowd divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates.  In
+this part there were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table-
+servants, and fat Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses,
+Armenian women with embroidered shawls drawn over their heads,
+sailors of the port.  They came to pass that way, through the
+sweetness of it, and this made a coign of vantage for the men with
+trays who were very persecuting there.  Lindsay and Alicia stood
+together beside the roses, her hands were deep in them, he
+perceived with pleasure that their glow was reflected in her face.
+"No," she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man who sat cross-
+legged in muslin draperies on the table.  "These are certainly of
+yesterday.  There is no scent left in them--and look!" she held up
+the bunch and shook it, a shower of pink petals and drops of water
+fell upon the round of her arm above the wrist where the laces of
+her sleeve slipped back.  Lindsay had something like a poetic
+appreciation of her, observing her put the bunch down tenderly as
+if she would not, if she could help it, find fault with any rose.
+The dealer drew out another, and handed it to her; a long-stemmed,
+wide-open, perfect thing, and it was then that her glance of
+delight, wandering, fell upon Laura Filbert.  Lindsay looked
+instantly, curiously in the same direction, and Alicia was aware
+that he also saw.  There ensued a terse moment with a burden of
+silence and the strangest misgivings, in which he may have imagined
+that he had his part alone but which was the heavier for her
+because of him.  These two had seen the girl before only under
+circumstances that suggested protection, that made excuse, on a
+platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her
+fellows under common conventions, common orders.  Here, alone,
+slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the
+sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress
+was a wound.  Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement
+of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away
+as if she were a woman walking in her sleep.  She had on her arm a
+sheaf of the War Cry.  This was another indignity; she offered them
+right and left, no one had a pice for her except one man, a sailor,
+who refused the paper.  When he rejoined his companions there was a
+hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads to look after her.
+
+The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
+seeing what had claimed their eyes.  There was nothing new, the
+"mem" passed every day at this hour.  She did no harm and no good.
+He, too, looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to
+Alladiah Khan, a man impatient in his religion, who refused it,
+mumbling in his beard.  With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on
+him, saying something.  Then Alladiah's green turban shook, his
+beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he raised his arm, and Laura in
+white astonishment darted from under it.  They seldom did that.
+
+Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made
+his stride forward.  She saw him twist his hand in the beard of
+Mecca and fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague
+thankfulness that it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed.
+More plainly she saw the manner of Duff's coming back to the girl
+and the way in which, with a look of half-frightened satisfaction,
+Laura gave herself up to him.  He was hurrying her away without a
+word.  Her surrender was as absolute and final as if she had been
+one of those desirable things he said he wanted to buy.  Alicia
+intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being forgotten, stepping
+up to them.  "Take her home in the carriage," she said to Duff,
+"and send it back for me.  I shall be here a long time still--quite
+a long time."  She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke, but made
+no answer to the "Good-morning!  God bless you!" with which the
+girl perfunctorily addressed her.  When they left her she looked
+down at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn
+of it deep into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt
+themselves more to suffer less.  It was not in the least fantastic
+of her, for she was not aware that she still held it, but that was
+the only rose she brought away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
+skirt, and struck out into the Maidan.  It spread before her, green
+where the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and
+yellow in the distance, where the light lay on the top of the
+withered grass.  It was like a great English park, with something
+of the village common, only the trees, for the most part, made
+avenues over it, running an arbitrary half-mile this way or that,
+with here and there a group dotted about in the open; and the
+brimming tank-pots were of India, and of nowhere else in the world.
+The sun was dipping behind the masts that showed where the straight
+border of the river ran, and the shadows of the pipals and the
+banyans were richly purple over the roads.  The light struck on the
+stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee which made
+behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push them
+back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
+Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether.  Calcutta,
+the teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that
+chaste frontage, and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here
+cattle grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles
+of the trees.  Calcutta the capital indeed was superimposed; one
+felt that always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the
+air among the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but
+luminous space and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and
+winging of crows.  What persisted then under the span of the sky,
+was the old India of rich tradition, and a bullock beneath the
+yoke, jogging through the evening to his own place where the blue
+haze hid the little huts on the rim of the city, the real India,
+and the rest was fiction and fabrication.
+
+The grass was crisp and pleasant.  Hilda deliberately sought its
+solace for her feet, letting their pressure linger.  All day long
+the sun had been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and
+now the air had a sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of
+harvests.  The crickets had been at it since five o'clock, and
+though the city rose not half a mile across the grass, it was the
+crickets she heard and listened to.  In making private statements
+of things, the crickets offered a chorus of agreement, and they
+never interrupted.  Not that she had much to consider, poor girl,
+which lent itself to a difference of opinion.  One might have
+thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not
+badly equipped.  She had all the argument--which is like saying all
+the arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only
+practical outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in
+the small value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with
+cynicism and made it more piquant.  She did not altogether scorn
+her own intelligence as the result, because it had always admitted
+the existence of dominating facts that belonged to life and not to
+reason; it was only the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one
+herself.  One might think round such a fact and talk round it--
+there were less exquisite satisfactions--but it was not to be cowed
+or abated, and in the end the things one said were only words.
+
+Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through
+her veins with her blood, warm and free.  The primitive things she
+saw helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her
+profound sweet presciences.  A coolie-woman, carrying a basket on
+her head, stopped and looked at her with full glistening eyes; they
+smiled at each other, and passed on.  She found herself upon a
+narrow path, worn smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made
+in its devious way toward the rich mists where the sun had gone
+down; and Hilda followed, breasting the glow and the colour and the
+wide, flat expanse, as if in the India of it there breathed
+something exquisitely sensuous and satisfying.  It struck sharp on
+her senses; she almost consciously thanked Heaven for such a
+responsive set of nerves.  Always and everywhere she was intensely
+conscious of what she saw and of how she saw it; and it was
+characteristic of her that she found in that saffron February
+evening, spreading to a purple rim, with wandering points of colour
+in a soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a
+mise en scene for her own complication.  She could take a tenderly
+artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result
+that came of examining it in other lights.  And she did, aware,
+with smiling eyes, of how full of colour, how dramatic it was.
+
+Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome
+seemed a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time
+for that.  For the present, there on the Maidan with the south
+wind, she took it with her head thrown up, in her glad, free
+fashion, as something that came in the way of life--the delightful
+way of life--with which it was absurd to quarrel because of a
+slight inconvenience or incongruity, things which helped, after
+all, to make existence fascinating.
+
+A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken
+stem, dropped from some coolie's necklace.  Hilda picked it up, and
+drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell.  She closed her eyes
+and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her
+feet.  All India and all her passion was in that violent,
+penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as she gave her senses up to
+it, a kind of dual perception of being near the core, the throbbing
+centre of the world's meaning.
+
+Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay.  He hastened to meet
+her, in his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that
+lay between them and gave transit to her senses from that other
+plane.  They encountered each other in full recognition of the
+happiness of the accident, and he turned back with her as a matter
+of course.  It was a kind of fruition of all that light and colour
+and passive delight that they should meet and take a path together;
+she at least was aware.  Hilda asked him if he was quite all right
+now, and he said "Absolutely" with a shade of emphasis.  She
+charged him with having been a remarkable case, and he piled up
+illustrations of what he felt able to do in his convalescence.
+There was something in the way he insisted upon his restoration
+which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.
+
+"And I hear I may congratulate you," she said.  "You have got what
+you wanted."
+
+"Someone has told you," he retorted, "who is not friendly to it."
+
+"On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial
+support--Alicia Livingstone."
+
+He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for
+the first time under such an aspect.
+
+"She has been immensely kind," he asserted.  "But she wasn't at
+first.  At first, she was hostile, like you, only that her
+hostility was different, just as she is different.  She had to be
+converted," he went on hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I
+imagined.  I think she takes a kind of pride in conquering her
+prejudices, and being true to the real breadth of her nature."
+
+"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad.  She might very
+well be content that it is charming.  And what is the difference
+between her hostility and mine?"
+
+"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon
+her, "is that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a
+dramatic gesture--"walks between us."
+
+"I know.  I tried to stiffen her.  I appealed to the worst in her
+on your behalf.  But it wasn't any use.  She succumbed, as you say,
+to her nobler instincts."
+
+Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and
+spent her paradox in twirling it.
+
+"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all
+proportion," Duff said.  "And I should be sorry--do you really want
+me to talk about this?"
+
+"Don't be stupid.  Of course."
+
+He took her permission with plain avidity.
+
+"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody
+else who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's
+tremendous desirability.  Her beauty would go for something
+anywhere, but I don't want to insist on that.  What marks her even
+more is the wonderful purity and transparency of her mind; one
+doesn't find it often now, women's souls are so clouded with
+knowledge.  I think that sort of thing appeals especially to me
+because my own design isn't in the least esoteric.  I'm only a man.
+Then she was so ludicrously out of her element.  A creature like
+that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily
+life.  That was my chance.  I could offer her her place.  It's not
+much to counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking,
+to equalise matters."
+
+Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an
+emanation from him.  It was his enthusiasm.  A cheerfulness had
+come upon him instead.  Also what he said had something categorical
+in it, something crisp and arranged.  He himself received benefit
+from the consideration of it, and she was aware that if this result
+followed, her own "conversion" was of very secondary importance.
+
+"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.
+
+"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so
+plainly right that nobody will think twice about it," Duff went on
+in an encouraged voice.  "It's odd how one's ideas materialise.  I
+want her drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk
+cushions."
+
+"When is it to happen?"
+
+"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."
+
+"Ah! then there will be time.  Time to get the white and gold
+furniture.  It wouldn't be my taste quite.  Is it Alicia's?"
+
+"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine.  We have talked it over
+together.  And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone.  In
+matters of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"
+
+"Oh Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip.  "Where is Miss
+Filbert now?"
+
+"At Number Ten, Middleton Street."
+
+"With the Livingstones?"
+
+"Is it so astonishing?  Miss Livingstone has been most practical in
+her kindness.  I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the
+club, and Laura is to stay with them until she sails."
+
+"She sails?"
+
+"In the Sutlej, next Wednesday.  She's got three months' leave.
+She really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an
+accommodating old sort.  She resigns at home, and I'm sending her
+to some dear old friends of mine.  She hasn't any particular people
+of her own.  She's got a notion of taking lessons of some kind--
+perfectly unnecessary, but if it amuses her--during the summer.
+And of course she will have to get her outfit together."
+
+"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you?"
+
+"Not a Calcutta wedding.  I meet her in Madras and we come up
+together."
+
+"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
+
+"Calcutta doesn't know.  If I had had my way in the beginning I
+fancy I would have trumpeted it.  But now I suppose it's wiser--why
+should one offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
+
+"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda
+absently.
+
+The coolie track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan,
+where it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore.  There
+was nothing about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked
+turf underfoot.  The cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man a
+little way off was a man, and not a horse, but did hardly more.
+"I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let us sit down," and sank
+comfortably on the fragrant grass.  Lindsay dropped beside her and
+they sat for a moment in silence.  A cricket chirped noisily a few
+inches from them.  Hilda put out her hand in that direction and it
+ceased.  Sounds wandered across from the encircling city, evening
+sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out, topaz
+points in the level glow.
+
+"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to
+see its proportions more clearly now."
+
+Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness.  "You are an awfully
+good sort, Duff," she said; "I wish you were out of Asia."
+
+"Oh, a magnificent sort."  The irony was contemplative, as if he
+examined himself to see.
+
+"You can make her life delightful to her.  The sacrifice will not
+endure, you know."
+
+"One can try.  It will be worth doing."  He said it as if it were a
+maxim, and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready.  As they
+sat without speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across
+the river, and left something chill and empty in the spaces about
+them.  Things grew hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited
+expanse of commonplace, grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps
+on the roads came very near.  "What a difference it makes!" Lindsay
+exclaimed, looking after the vanished light, "and how suddenly it
+goes!"
+
+Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen
+sadness far into the changed landscape.  "Ah, well, my dear," she
+said, with apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with
+both hands."  She made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his
+feet, helped her.  As if the moment had some special significance,
+something to be underlined, he kept her hand while he said, "you
+will always represent something in mine.  I can depend upon you--I
+shall know that you are there."
+
+"Yes," she said sincerely.  "Yes indeed," and it seemed to her that
+he looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was
+only another effect of atmosphere.  "After all," she said, as they
+turned to walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever
+has taken a good deal out of you."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones'
+roof followed each other into the past that is not much pondered.
+Alicia at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta
+disappeared entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory
+there was a rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to
+stir up the dust.  It gave a soothing wistfulness to discontent to
+think this, which a discerning glance might often have seen about
+her lips and eyebrows as she lay back among her carriage cushions
+under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening
+drive.  She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that
+or any impression.  Such things require range and atmosphere, and
+she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was
+blocked by crowding, narrowing facts.  There was certainly no room
+for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste.  Also
+it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her
+hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
+worthlessness.  She turned away from them more actively than from
+the rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with
+dilemmas and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget.
+As a matter of fact there were not very many days, and they were
+largely filled with millinery.  Even the dilemmas and distresses,
+when they asserted themselves, were more or less overswept, as if
+for the sake of decency, by billows of spotted muslin, with which
+Celine, who felt the romance of the situation, made herself
+marvellously clever.  Celine, indeed, was worth in this exigency
+many times her wages.  Alicia hastened to "lend" her to the fullest
+extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert contriving and
+arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's beneficence.  It
+became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the source, and
+they stitched together while she, with careful reserves, watched
+for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from the
+lips of the maid.  At other times she occupied herself with her
+Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of
+Mrs. Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations.
+She had several times felt, seated beside Celine, how grateful she
+ought to be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths
+of such pleasantness, though Celine herself seemed to stand rather
+far from their border, probably because she was a Catholic.  Mrs.
+Sand came occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had
+always a fresh remembrance of how much she had done in giving so
+generous a friend as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta.  It was
+reasonable enough that there should be a falling off in Mr.
+Lindsay's attendance just now in Laura's absence, but when they
+were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would be very few evening
+services when she, the Ensign, would miss their bright faces.
+
+Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made tea, and
+pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat.  He
+found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant.  She sat up
+straight, and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of
+year up-country, but nothing at all to complain of yet.  He also
+discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the
+muslins, and explained one or two bargains.  She seemed to wish to
+make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very
+expensive to take a wife.  In the course of a few days one of the
+costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing
+before him for the first time in secular dress.  The stays insisted
+a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice
+betrayed her narrow-chested.  Above its frills her throat protruded
+unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading bird's,
+and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her
+sides.  She had put on the hat that matched; it was the kind of
+pretty disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow
+of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that
+way of making it becoming.  Among these accessories the
+significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant,
+its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased.
+
+She made no demand for admiration on this occasion, she seemed
+sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time when they
+were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines
+of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the
+conventionalities of the situation.
+
+"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.
+
+The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the
+river at six o'clock in the morning.  Preparations for her comfort
+had been completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff
+had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the
+morning.  He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed
+quarter-deck.  She wore her Army clothes--she had come on board in
+one of the muslins--and she was softly crying.  From the jetty on
+the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted
+orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the over-ruling sound
+of a hymn.  Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay
+the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on
+earth, bearing her heavenly commission.
+
+
+     "Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
+      To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you,
+      We've laboured together, united in heart,
+      But now we must close and soon we must part."
+
+
+They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but
+they evidently meant to sing the ship out of port.  Lindsay sat
+down beside the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her
+hand.  There was a consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort,
+which he owed perhaps to a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up
+and down before him, between the ranks of the steamer-chairs.
+Nevertheless as she presently turned a calmed face to him with her
+pale apology he had the sensation of a rebound toward the ideal
+that had finally perished in the spotted muslin, and when a little
+later he watched the long backward trail of smoke as the steamer
+moved down the clear morning river, he reflected that it was a
+satisfaction to have prevailed.
+
+The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
+dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood,
+were to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his
+Excellency the Viceroy.  Alicia, when she included Duff in her
+invitations, felt an assurance that the steamer must by that time
+have reached Aden, and rose almost with buoyancy to the illusion
+you can make if you like, with the geographical mile.  She could
+hardly have left him out in any case--he could almost have demanded
+an explanation--since it was one of those parties which she gave
+every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus of Hilda Howe.
+It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society was so
+little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there were
+so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would
+"mind."  Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss
+Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so
+fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced.
+She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level,
+it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner-
+party; and it was seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking,
+to carry away a bone from the feast.  If you found this
+reprehensible she would have told you she had observed they do it
+in Japan, where manners are the best in the world.
+
+Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party
+than I, with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself
+inclined to do.  To me it is depressing and a little cruel to be
+compelled to betray the inadequacy of the personal element at
+Alicia's banquets, especially in connection with the conspicuous
+excellence of the cooking.  A poverty of cuisine would have
+provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would have been
+offered up to the gods that season.  The limitations of her
+resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact
+that she asked such a person as the Head of the Department of
+Education, with no better reason than that he had laid almost the
+whole of Shelley under critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta
+University.  There was also a civilian who had written a few years
+before an article in the Nineteenth Century about the aboriginal
+tribes of the Central Provinces, and the lady attached to him, who
+had been at one time the daughter of a Lieutenant-Governor.  The
+Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry loved meeting anybody
+that was clever, admired brains beyond anything; and an A.D.C. who
+had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was; and Captain Salter
+Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when they
+were produced in Simla and was invariably considered up there to
+have done them better than any professional they have at home,
+though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the
+entertainment happened to be a burlesque.  Taking Hilda and Lindsay
+and Stephen Arnold as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with
+the contortionist as it were at the apex, on his head.  The
+Livingstones had family connection with a leading London publishing
+firm, and Alicia may possibly have reflected as she surveyed her
+completed work, how much better than capering captains she could
+have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be admitted likely that she
+would harbour, at that particular instant, so ungracious a thought.
+And indeed it was a creditable party, it would almost unanimously
+call itself, next day, a delightful one.  Miss Howe made the most
+agreeable excitement, you might almost have heard the heart-beats
+of the wife of the literary civilian, as she just escaped being
+introduced, and so availed herself of the dinner's opportunity for
+intimate observation without letting herself in a particle--most
+clever.  Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed upon the spear, she
+always did, and made a gushing little speech with every eye upon
+her in the middle of the room, without a thought of consequences.
+The A.D.C. was also empresse, one would have thought that he
+himself was acting, the way he bowed and picked up Hilda's fan--a
+grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the week before,
+in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the Commander-in-
+Chief.  Duff got out of the way to enable the newly introduced Head
+of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe that he never
+went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too badly
+ventilated; and Stephen Arnold arriving late, shot like an
+embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was
+still engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was
+announced.
+
+There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were
+the pictorial features.  Half of the people had taken their seats
+when he began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous half-
+checked smile.  Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula,
+blushed hotly; then she stood while he spoke, with bowed head and
+clasped hands like a reverently inclining statue.  Her long lashes
+brushed her cheek; she drew a kind of isolation from the way her
+manner underlined the office.  The civilian's wife, with a side-
+glance, settled it off-hand that she was absurdly affected; and
+indeed to an acuter intelligence it might have looked as if she
+took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not offered.
+
+That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife,
+observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she
+complained afterwards that Miss Howe was disappointing.  She
+certainly went out of her way to be normal.  Since it was her daily
+business to personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her
+pleasure that night to be like everybody else.  She did it on
+opulent lines; there was a richness in her agreement that the going
+was as hard as iron on the Ellenborough course, and a soft
+ingenuousness in her inquiries about punkahs and the brain-fever
+bird that might have aroused suspicion, but after a brief struggle
+to respond to the unusualness she ought to have represented,
+Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms instead.
+She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance; she
+looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the
+jewelled necks of the women.  The social essence of Alicia's little
+dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the
+civilian's wife.  She felt the champagne investing her chatter and
+the chatter of the Head of the Department of Education with the
+most satisfying qualities, which were oddly stimulated when she
+glanced over the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn
+of the oval, giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to
+Mrs. Barberry, and drinking water.  The occasion grew before her
+into a gorgeous flower, living, pulsating, and in the heart of its
+light and colour the petals closed over her secret, over him, the
+unconscious priest with the sloping shoulders, thinking of
+abstinence and listening to Mrs. Barberry.
+
+It transpired when the men came up that there was no unanimity
+about going to Government House.  The Livingstones craved the
+necessity of absence, if anyone would supply it by staying on; it
+would be a boon they said, and cited the advancement of the season.
+"One gets to bed so much earlier," Surgeon-Major Livingstone urged,
+at which Alicia raised her eyebrows and everybody laughed.  Lindsay
+elected to gratify them, with the proclaimed purpose of seeing how
+long Livingstone could be kept up, and the civilian pair agreed,
+apparently from a tendency to remain seated.  The A.D.C. had, of
+course, to go; duty called him; and he declared a sense of slighted
+hospitality that anybody should remain behind.  "Besides," he
+cried, with ingenuous privilege, "who's goin' to chaperone Miss
+Howe?"
+
+Hilda stood in the midst.  Tall, in violet velvet, she had a flush
+that made her magnificent; her eyes were deep and soft.  It was
+patent that she was out of proportion to the other women, body and
+soul; there was altogether too much of her; and it was only the
+men, when Captain Corby spoke, who looked silently responsive.
+
+"We're coming away so early," said Mrs. Barberry, buttoning her
+glove.  Hilda had begun to smile, and, indeed, the situation had
+its humour, but there was also behind her eyes an appreciation of
+another sort.  "Don't," she said to Alicia, in the low, quick reach
+of her prompting tone, as if the other had mistaken her cue, but
+the moment hardly permitted retreat, and Alicia turned an
+unflinching graceful front to the lady in the Department of
+Education.  "Then I think I must ask you," she said.
+
+The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the
+very dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him
+as she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would
+be delighted.
+
+"Nobody suggests ME!" exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully.  They
+were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open
+door, the Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and
+then the battered vehicle in Hilda's hire.  It had an air of
+ludicrous forlornness, with its damaged paint and its tied-up
+harness.  Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of
+her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of backward
+transformation.
+
+"I could chaperone you all!" she cried gaily back at them, as she
+passed down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation
+it seemed reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into
+the gharry to see that she was quite comfortable.  The unusual
+thing, which nobody else heard, was that he said to her then with
+shamed discomfort, "It doesn't matter--it doesn't matter," and that
+Hilda, driving away, found herself without a voice to answer the
+good-nights they chorussed after her.
+
+Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dogcart, and Hilda, with
+her purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the
+way.  She re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted,
+whose name it occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom.  They
+were late; there was hardly anybody else but the attendants; and
+Mrs. Winstick smiled freely, and said she loved the colour of
+Hilda's dress; also that she would give worlds for an invisible
+hairpin--oh, thank you!--and that it was simply ducky of her
+Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out.  She did
+hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening--they would meet again later
+on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the
+ballroom--perfectly lovely.  So she vanished; but Hilda went with
+certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the
+red strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head
+thrust forward, waiting for her.
+
+They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed
+women, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the
+pillared spaces of the ballroom.  People had not been asked to
+dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation.
+There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening
+to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the
+distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the
+air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and
+the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to
+each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few
+were aware whether music was being rendered or not.  Anyone
+sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of this sort
+would have found the relief of concentration and directness only
+near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the
+natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and
+sandwiches.
+
+They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried
+priest.  She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their
+ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious.
+Their interests were not in any way diffused, they had one straight
+line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above
+them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department.  The Head
+of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a
+travelling eye in search over his shoulder of somebody with whom it
+would be more advantageous to converse.  Yet there were a few
+people apparently not altogether indifferent to the presence of
+Miss Howe.  She saw them here and there, and when Arnold said, "It
+must seem odd to you, but I know hardly anybody here.  We attempt
+no social duties," she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia
+had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm
+pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the
+world rather than to the cloister.  Stephen knew their names and
+their dignities.  He received what she said with suitably impressed
+eyebrow and nods of considerate assent.  Hilda carried him along,
+as it were, in their direction.  She was full that night of a
+triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a
+human unit.  There was that in her blood which assured her of a
+welcome, it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her
+force, her distinction among other women.  She pressed forward to
+human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter
+of course, going towards the people who were not indifferent to the
+fact that she was there, who could not be entirely, since they had
+some sort of knowledge of her.
+
+In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged
+in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her.  She
+encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then
+turning she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places--
+were no longer in her path.  One lady put herself at a safe
+distance and then bowed, with much cordiality.  It was extraordinary
+in a group of five how many glistening shoulders would be presented,
+quite without offence, to her approach.  Mrs. Winstick had hidden
+behind the Superintendent of Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was
+explaining, between spoonfuls of strawberry ice, her terrible
+situation.  And from the lips of another lady whose face she knew,
+she heard after she had passed, "Don't you think it's rather an
+omnium gatherum?"
+
+It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment with serious
+interest, how the little world about them had the same negative
+attitude for the missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a
+hardly perceptible difference.  Within its limits there was plainly
+no room for him either.  His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed
+with the kind of respect which implies distance, and in the
+wandering eyes of the others it was plain that he did not exist.
+She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that he carried
+himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.  Expecting
+nothing he was unaware that he received nothing.  It was odd, and
+in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their
+mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the
+unconscious one.  For herself, the tide that bore her on was too
+deep to let these things hurt her, she looked down and saw the
+soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom,
+gliding smoothly over.  They brought no stereotype to her smile, no
+dissonance to what she found to say.  When at last she and Arnold
+sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she
+herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it
+without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social
+manifestation of some dramatic value.  In offering up her egotism
+that way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one
+could hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her
+pause.  She anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was
+relieved to find in her light comment that she took the typical
+Mrs. Winstick less seriously than he had supposed when they drove
+away from the Livingstones'.  It could not occur to him to correct
+the impression he had then by the sound of his own voice uttering
+sympathy.
+
+"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff,"
+she said.  "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself!  That is the
+wave's reflection."
+
+"It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there," said the
+priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of
+high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,--"and there, I
+think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience
+of the tides and a full beating upon many shores--"
+
+"Ah, my sea!  I hear it calling always, even," she said half-
+reflectively, "when I am talking to you.  But sometimes I think I
+am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always
+with the calling in my ears--"  She seemed to have dropped
+altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing,
+because he could not understand.
+
+"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it?
+One doesn't blame these people.  They are stupid--that's all.  They
+want the obvious.  The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope--
+without the smallest diamond--who does song and dance on Saturday
+nights--what can you expect!  If I had a great name they would be
+pleased enough to see me.  It is one of the rewards of the fame."
+She was silent for a moment, and then she added, "They are very
+poor."
+
+"Those rewards!  I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you
+were not devoured by thirst for them."
+
+"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never
+am."
+
+He took it at its face value.  They had had some delightful
+conversations.  If her words awakened anything in him it was the
+remembrance of these.  The solace of her companionship presented
+itself to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence
+another seal; that was all.  They sat where they were for half an
+hour, and something like antagonism and displeasure towards the
+secretaries' wives settled upon them, from which Hilda, interrupting
+a glance or two from the ladies purring past, drew suspicion.  "I
+am going now," she said.  "It--it isn't quite suitable here," and
+there was just enough suggestion in the point of her fan to make
+him think of his frock.  "It is an unpardonable truth that if we
+stay any longer I shall make people talk about you."
+
+He turned astonished eyes upon her, eyes in which she remembered
+afterwards there was absolutely nothing but a literal and pained
+apprehension of what she said.  "You are a good woman," he
+exclaimed.  "How could such a thing be possible!"
+
+The faintest embarrassment, the merest suggestion of distress, came
+into her face and concentrated in her eyes, which she fixed upon
+him as if she would bring his words to the last analysis, and
+answer him as she would answer a tribunal.
+
+"A good woman?" she repeated, "I don't know--isn't that a
+refinement of virtue?  No; standing on my sex I make no claim,
+but as PEOPLE go I am good.  Yes, I am good."
+
+"In my eyes you are splendid," he replied, content, and gave her
+his arm.  They went together through the reception-rooms, and the
+appreciation of her grew in him.  If in the bright and silken
+distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a
+cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it.
+But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he
+uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the
+sensibility of swine.
+
+"Yes," she laughed into her good-night to him, "but I'm not sure
+that it isn't better to be the pig than the pearl."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+"Not long ago," said Hilda, "I had a chat with him.  We sat on the
+grass in the middle of the Maidan, and there was nothing to
+interfere with my impressions."
+
+"What were your impressions?  No!" Alicia cried.  "No!  Don't tell
+me.  It is all so peaceful now, and simple, and straightforward.
+You think such extraordinary things.  He comes here quite often, to
+talk about her.  He is coming this afternoon.  So I have impressions
+too--and they are just as good."
+
+"All right."  Hilda crossed her knees more comfortably.  "WHAT did
+you say the Surgeon-Major paid for those Teheran tiles?"
+
+"Something absurd--I've forgotten.  He writes to her regularly,
+diary letters, by every mail."
+
+"Do you tell him what to put into them?"
+
+"Hilda, sometimes--you're positively gross."
+
+"I daresay, my dear.  You didn't come out of a cab, and you never
+are.  I like being gross, I feel nearer to nature then, but I don't
+say that as an excuse.  I like the smell of warm kitchens and the
+talk of bus-drivers, and bread and herrings for my tea--all the low
+satisfactions appeal to me.  Beer, too, and hand-organs."
+
+"I don't know when to believe you.  He talks about her quite
+freely, and--and so do I.  She is really interesting in her way."
+
+"And in perspective."
+
+"Why should you be odiously smart.  He and Stephen"--her glance was
+tentative--"have made it up."
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"He admits now that Stephen was justified, from his point of view.
+But of course that is easy enough when you have come off best."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Hilda, what do you THINK?"
+
+"Oh, I think it's deplorable--you have always known what I think.
+Have you seen him lately--I mean your cousin?"
+
+"He lunched with us yesterday.  He was more enthusiastic than ever
+about you."
+
+"I wish you could tell me that he hadn't mentioned my name.  I
+don't want his enthusiasm.  The pit gives one that."
+
+"Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of--of what it ought to be?
+What is the principal part of it?  Not enthusiasm--adoration?"
+
+"Goodness, no!  Something quite different and quite simple--too
+simple to explain.  Besides, it is a thing that requires the
+completest ignorance to discuss comfortably.  Do you want me to
+vivisect my soul?  You yourself, can you talk about what most
+possesses you?"
+
+"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at
+the same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah! Mr. Lindsay."
+
+There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss
+Howe's greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this
+made a difference, and that he must find other things to say.  He
+found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish
+her tea before she went.  Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed
+satisfied to abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place
+in the conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about
+cream and sugar.  Alicia waited, it was her way; she sank almost
+palpably into the tapestries until some reviving circumstance
+should bring her out again, a process which was quite compatible
+with her little laughs and comments.  She waited, offering repose,
+and unconscious even of that.  You know Hilda Howe as a creature of
+bold reflections.  Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the teapot,
+the conviction visited her that a sex three-quarters of this fibre
+explained the monastic clergy.
+
+"It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the
+impossible," Lindsay said; "that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home
+solvent."
+
+"I don't know how he can help it now.  But I have to be very firm.
+He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen.  I tell him I will if he'll
+combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between
+the acts.  The only way it would go, in this capital."
+
+"Oh, do produce Ibsen," Alicia exclaimed; "I've never seen one of
+his plays--doesn't it sound terrible!"
+
+"If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should
+like to, for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to
+deliver to a scratch company.  He must have equal merit, or there's
+no meaning.  You see he makes none of the vulgar appeals.  It would
+be a tame travesty--nobody could redeem it alone.  You must keep to
+the old situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any
+part of Asia."
+
+"I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in The Offence
+of Galilee?" Duff said.  "Everyone who knows the least bit about it
+said you were marvellous in that."
+
+"Marvellous," said Alicia
+
+Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking.
+The others looked at her absent eyes.  "A bazar trick or two helped
+me," she said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that
+might be hanging on the wall, or visible out of the window.
+
+"And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in
+Calcutta?" Duff asked.
+
+"Not in Calcutta, or anywhere.  The rest hate it--nobody has a
+chance but me," Hilda said, and got up.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Alicia began, but Miss Howe was already half-
+way out of the discussion, in the direction of the door.  There was
+often a brusqueness in her comings and goings, but she usually left
+a flavour of herself behind.  One turned with facility to talk
+about her, this being the easiest way of applying the stimulus that
+came of talking to her.  It was more conspicuous than either of
+these two realised that they accepted her retreat without a word,
+that there was even between them a consciousness of satisfaction
+that she had gone.
+
+"This morning's mail," said Alicia, smiling brightly at Lindsay,
+"brought you a letter, I know."  It was extraordinary how detached
+she could be from her vital personal concern in him.  It seemed
+relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied
+herself with the immediate play of circumstance or was lost in her
+observation of him.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it," Lindsay said.  "This was the
+first by which I could possibly hear from England."
+
+"Ah, well, now you will have no more anxiety.  Letters from on
+board ship are always difficult to write and unsatisfactory,"
+Alicia said.  Miss Filbert's had been postcards, with a wide
+unoccupied margin at the bottom.
+
+"The Sutlej seems to have arrived on the third; that's a day later,
+isn't it, than we made out she would be?"
+
+Alicia consulted her memory, and found she couldn't be sure.
+Lindsay was vexed by a similar uncertainty, but they agreed that
+the date was early in the month.
+
+"Did they get comfortably through the Canal?  I remember being tied
+up there for forty-eight hours once."
+
+"I don't think she says, so I fancy it must have been all right.
+The voyage is bound to do her good.  I've asked the Simpsons to
+watch particularly for any sign of malaria later, though.  One
+can't possibly know what she may have imported from that slum in
+Bentinck Street."
+
+"And what was it like after Gibraltar?" Alicia asked, with a barely
+perceptible glance at the envelope edges showing over his breast-
+pocket.
+
+"I'll look," and he sorted one out.  It was pink and glossy, with a
+diagonal water-stripe.  Lindsay drew out the single sheet it
+contained, and she could see that every line was ruled and faintly
+pencilled.  "Let me see," said he.  "To begin at the beginning.
+'We arrived home on the third,'--you see it was the third,--'making
+very slow progress the last day on account of a fog in the
+Channel'--ah, a fog in the Channel!--'which was a great
+disappointment to some on board who were impatient to meet their
+loved ones.  One lady had not seen her family of five for seven
+years.  She said she would like to get out and swim, and you could
+not wonder.  She was my s--stable companion."
+
+"Quaint!" said Alicia.
+
+"She has picked up the expression on board.  'So--so she told me
+this.'  Oh yes.  'Now that it is all over I have written the voyage
+down among my mercies in spite of three days' sickness, when you
+could keep nothing on--'  What are those two words, Miss
+Livingstone?  I can't quite make them out."
+
+"'Your'--cambric?--stom--'stomach'--'your stomach.'"
+
+"Oh, quite so.  Thanks!--'in the Bay of Biscay.'  You see it WAS
+rough after Gib.  'Everybody was'--yes.  'The captain read Church
+of England prayers on Sunday mornings, in which I had no objection
+to join, and we had mangoes every day for a week after leaving
+Ceylon.'"
+
+"Miss Filbert was so fond of mangoes," Alicia said.
+
+"Was she?  'The passengers got up two dances, and quite a number of
+gentlemen invited me, but I declined with thanks, though I would
+not say it is wrong in itself.'"  Lindsay seemed to waver; her
+glance went near enough to him to show her that his face had a red
+tinge of embarrassment.  He looked at the letter uncertainly, on
+the point of folding it up.
+
+"You see she hasn't danced for so long," Alicia put in quickly;
+"she would naturally hesitate about beginning again with anybody
+but you.  I shouldn't wonder," she added gently, "if she never
+does, with anybody else."
+
+"I know it's an idea some women have," he replied.  "I think it's
+rather--nice."
+
+"And her impressions of the Simpsons--and Plymouth?"
+
+"She goes on to that."  He reconsulted the letter.  "'Mr. and Mrs.
+Simpson met me as expected and welcomed me very affably.'  She has
+got hold of a wrong impression there, I fancy; the Simpsons
+couldn't be 'affable.'  'They seem very kind and pleasant for such
+stylish people, and their house is lovely, with electric light in
+the parlour and hot and cold water throughout.  They seem very
+earnest people and have family prayers regularly, but I have not
+yet been asked to lead.  Four servants come in to prayers.  Mr. and
+Mrs. Simpson are deeply interested in the work of the Army, though
+I think Plymouth as a whole is more taken up with the C.M.S.; but
+we cannot have all things.'  Dear me, yes!  I remember those
+evangelical teas and the disappointment that I could not speak more
+definitely about the work among the Sontalis."
+
+"Fancy her having caught the spirit of the place already!"
+exclaimed Alicia.  "He went on:  'Mr. and Mrs. Simpson have a
+beautiful garden and grow most of their own vegetables.  We sit in
+it a great deal and I think of all that has passed.  I hope ever
+that it has been for the best and pray for you always.  Oh that
+your feet may be set in the right path and that we may walk hand in
+hand upon the way to Zion!'"  Lindsay lowered his voice and read
+the last sentences rapidly, as if the propulsion of the first part
+of the letter sent him through them.  Then he stopped abruptly, and
+Alicia looked up.
+
+"That's all, only," he added, with an awkward smile, "the usual
+formula."
+
+"'God bless you'?" she asked, and he nodded.
+
+"It has a more genuine ring than most formulas," she observed.
+
+"Yes, hasn't it?  May I have another cup?"  He restored the pink
+sheet to its pink envelope, and both to his breast-pocket, while
+she poured out the other cup, but Miss Filbert was still present
+with them.  They went on talking about her, and entirely in the
+tone of congratulation--the suitability of the Simpsons, the
+suitability of Plymouth, the probability that she would entirely
+recover, in its balmy atmosphere, her divine singing voice.
+Plymouth certainly was in no sense a tonic, but Miss Filbert didn't
+need a tonic; she was too much inclined to be strung up as it was.
+What she wanted was the soothing, quieting influence of just
+Plymouth's meetings and just Plymouth's teas.  The charms that so
+sweetly and definitely characterised her would expand there; it was
+a delightful flowery environment for them, and she couldn't fail to
+improve in health.  Devonshire's visitors got tremendously well
+fed, with fish items of especial excellence.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Nobody could have been more impressed with Hilda's influence upon
+Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's commercial probity than Mr. Llewellyn
+Stanhope himself.  He was a prey to all noble feelings; they ruled
+his life and spoiled his bargains; and gratitude, when it had a
+chance, which was certainly seldom in connection with leading
+ladies, dominated him entirely.  He sat in the bar of the Great
+Eastern Hotel with tears in his eyes, talking about what Miss Howe
+had done for him, and gave unnecessary backsheesh to coolies who
+brought him small bills--so long, that is, as they were the small
+bills of this season.  When they had reference to the liabilities
+of a former and less prosperous year he waved them away with a
+bitter levity which belonged to the same period.  His view of his
+obligations was strictly chronological, and in taking it he
+counted, like the poet, only happy hours.  The bad debt and the bad
+season went consistently together to oblivion; the sun of to-day's
+remarkable receipts could not be expected to penetrate backwards.
+
+He had only one fault to find with Miss Howe--she had no artistic
+conscience--none, and he found this with the utmost leniency,
+basking in the consciousness that it made his own more conspicuous.
+She was altogether in the grand style, if you understood Mr.
+Stanhope, but nothing would induce her to do herself justice before
+Calcutta; she seemed to have taken the measure of the place and to
+be as indifferent!  Try to ring in anything worth doing and she was
+off with the bit between her teeth, and you simply had to put up
+with it.  The second lead had a great deal more ambition, and a
+very good little woman in her way, too, but of course not half the
+talent.  He was obliged to confess that Miss Howe wasn't game for
+risks, especially after doing her Rosalind the night the circus
+opened to a twenty-five rupee house.  It WAS monstrous.  She seemed
+to think that nothing mattered so much as that everybody should be
+paid on the first of the month.  There was one other grievance,
+which Llewellyn mentioned only in confidence with a lowered voice.
+That was Bradley.  Hilda wasn't lifting a finger to keep Bradley.
+Result was, Bradley was crooking his elbow a great deal too often
+lately and going off every way.  He, Llewellyn, had put it to her
+if that was the way to treat a man the Daily Telegraph had spoken
+about as it had spoken about Hamilton Bradley.  Where was she--
+where was he--going to find another?  No, he didn't say marry
+Bradley; there were difficulties, and after all that might be the
+very way to lose him.  But a woman had an influence, and that
+influence could never be more fittingly exercised than in the cause
+of dramatic art based on Mr. Stanhope's combinations.  Mr. Stanhope
+expressed himself with a difference, but it came to that.
+
+Perhaps if you pursued Llewellyn, pushed him, as it were, along the
+track of what he had to put up with, you would have come upon the
+further fact that as a woman of business Miss Howe had no parallel
+for procrastination.  Next season was imminent in his arrangements,
+as Christmas numbers are imminent to publishers at midsummer, and
+here she was shying at a contract as if they had months for
+consideration.  It wasn't either as if she complained of anything
+in the terms--that would be easy enough fixed--but she said herself
+that it was a bigger salary than he, Llewellyn, would ever be able
+to pay unless she went round with the hat.  Nor had she any
+objection to the tour--a fascinating one--including the Pacific
+Slope and Honolulu.  It stumped him, Llewellyn, to know what she
+did object to, and why she couldn't bark it out at once, seeing she
+must understand perfectly well it was no use his going to Bradley
+without first settling with her.
+
+Hilda, alone in her own apartment--it was difficult to keep
+Llewellyn Stanhope away from even that door in his pursuit of her
+signature--considered the vagary life had become for her that was
+so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely
+hers.  Alicia knew, of course; but that was as if she had written
+it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a
+drawer.  Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of
+it was tangled now in a speculation.  There had been a time filled
+with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her like a
+buoyant sea, and she had been content to float in it, imagining
+desirable things.  Stanhope's waiting contract made a limit to the
+time--a limit she brought up against without distress or shock, but
+with a kind of recognising thrill in contact at last with the
+necessity for action, decision, a climax of high heart-beats.  She
+saw with surprise that she had lived with her passion these weeks
+and months half consciously expecting that a crucial moment would
+dissolve it, like a person aware that he dreams and will presently
+awake.  She had not faced till now any exigency of her case.  But
+the crucial moment had leapt upon her, pointing out the subjection
+of her life, and she, undefended, sought only how to accomplish her
+bonds.
+
+Certainly she saw no solution that did not seem monstrous; yet
+every pulse in her demanded a solution; there was no questioning
+the imperious need.  She had the fullest, clearest view of the
+situation, and she looked at it without flinching and without
+compromise.  Above all she had true vision of Stephen Arnold,
+glorifying nowhere, extenuating nothing.  It was almost cruel to be
+the victim of such circumstance, and be denied the soft uses of
+illusion; but if that note of sympathy had been offered to Hilda
+she would doubtless have retorted that it was precisely because she
+saw him that she loved him.  His figure, in its poverty and
+austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of her
+nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompassing; and her
+possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and
+protecting.  I think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of
+content with which, but for Llewellyn and his contract, she would
+have been willing to go on indefinitely.  It made him hers in a
+primary and essential way, beside which any mere acknowledgment or
+vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the capital of a pillar firmly
+rooted.  There may be an appearance that she took a good deal for
+granted; if there is, I fear that in the baldness of this history
+it has not been evident how much and how variously Arnold depended
+on her, in how many places her colour and her vitality patched out
+the monkish garment of his soul.  This with her enthusiasm and her
+cognisance.  It may be remembered, too, that there was in the very
+tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an
+imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.
+Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little
+flickering doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the
+glow of her imagination she quenched very easily with the
+reflection that such a superficies was after all a sophistry, and
+that only its rudiments were facts.  She proposed, calmly and
+lovingly, to deal with the facts.
+
+She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions
+under which she should prevail; but her world had always, always
+shaped itself answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the
+ground now, and left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it
+was because she would not find any concessions of her own among its
+features if she could help it.  It was a trick she played upon her
+consciousness; she would not look, but she could see without
+looking.  She saw that which explained itself to be best, fittest,
+most reasonable; and thus she sometimes wandered with Arnold
+anticipatively, on afternoons when there was no matinee, through
+the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.
+
+She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of those
+steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to
+possibilities.  She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see
+her then.  She had not spoken to him since the night of the
+Viceroy's party, when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-
+gharry to wish him good-night, and he walked home alone under the
+stars, trying to remember a line of Horace, a chaste one, about
+woman's beauty.  She sent the note by post.  There was no answer;
+but that was as usual; there never was an answer unless something
+prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes before the time.
+When the time arrived she sat under the blue umbrellas devising
+what she would say, creating fifty different forms of what he would
+say, while the hands slipped round the clock past the moment that
+should have brought his step to the door.  Hilda noted it, and
+compared her watch.  A bowl of roses stood on a little table near a
+window; she got up and went to it, bending over and rearranging the
+flowers.  The light fell on her and on the roses; it was a
+beautiful attitude, and when at a footfall she looked up
+expectantly it was more beautiful.  But it was only another
+boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves, with a highly varnished complexion, who
+took off his hat elaborately as he passed the open door.  She
+became conscious of her use of the roses, and abandoned them.
+Presently she sat down on a bentwood rocking-chair, and swayed to
+and fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence.  Half an hour later she
+was still sitting there.  Her face had changed, something had faded
+in it; her gaze at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when
+she glanced at the empty door it was with timidity.  Arnold had not
+come and did not come.
+
+The evening passed without explanation, and next morning the post
+brought no letter.  It was simplest to suppose that her own had not
+reached him, and Hilda wrote again.  The second letter she sent by
+hand, with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature.  The
+messenger brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials,
+"J. L. for S. A.," and there was no reply.  There remained the
+possibility of absence from Calcutta, of illness.  That he should
+have gone away was most unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only
+too probable.  Hilda looked from her bedroom window across the
+varying expanse of parapeted flat roofs and mosque bubbles that lay
+between her and College Street, and curbed the impulse in her feet
+that would have resulted in the curious spectacle of Llewellyn
+Stanhope's leading lady calling in person at a monastic gate to
+express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it was barred.
+A situation after all could be too pictorial, looked at from the
+point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with
+grateful humour across her anxiety.  Alicia would have known; but
+both the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon,
+with Duff Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey.  They were
+most anxious, Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them.
+Could he in the end have gone?  There was, of course, the
+accredited fount and source of all information, the Father
+Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda Howe apply for it!
+Llewellyn might write for her; but it was glaringly impossible that
+the situation should lay itself so far open to Llewellyn.  Looking
+in vain for resources she came upon an expedient.  She found a
+sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy.  On it she
+wrote with red ink, in the cramped hand of the hired scribe of the
+bazar:--
+
+
+"SIR--Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone
+mofussil or England as I have some small business with him.  Yours
+obedient servant,--WUN SING."
+
+
+"It can't be forgery," she reflected, "since there isn't a Wun
+Sing," and added an artistic postscript, "Boots and shoes verry
+much cheap for cash."  She made up the envelope to match, and
+addressed it with consistent illiteracy to the head of the Mission.
+The son of the Chinese basketmaker, who dwelt almost next door,
+spoke neither English nor Hindustani, but showed an easy
+comprehension of her promise of backsheesh when he should return
+with an answer.  She had a joyful anticipation, while she waited,
+of the terms in which she should tell Arnold how she passed
+disguised as a Chinese shoemaker, before the receptive and
+courteous consciousness of his spiritual senior; of how she
+penetrated, in the suggestion of a pigtail and an unpaid bill,
+within the last portals that might be expected to receive her in
+the form under which, for example, certain black and yellow posters
+were presenting her to the public at that moment.  She saw his
+scruples go swiftly down before her laughter and the argument of
+her tender anxiety, which she was quite prepared to learn foolish
+and unnecessary.  There was even an adventurous instant in which
+she reaped at actual personation of the Chinaman, and she looked in
+rapture at the vivid risk of the thing before she abandoned it as
+involving too much.  She sent no receipt form this time--that was
+not the practice of the bazar--and when, hours after, her messenger
+returned with weariness and dejection written upon him, in the
+characters of a perfunctory Chinese smile, she could only gather
+from his negative head and hands that no answer had been given him,
+and that her expedient had failed.
+
+Hilda stared at her dilemma.  Its properties were curiously simple.
+His world and hers, with the same orbit, had no point of contact.
+Once swinging round their eastern centre they had come close enough
+for these two, leaning very far out, to join hands.  When they
+loosed it seemed they lost.
+
+The more she gazed at it the more it looked a preposterous thing
+that in a city vibrant with human communication by all the methods
+which make it easy, it should be possible for one individual thus
+to drop suddenly and completely from the knowledge of another--a
+mediaeval thing.  Their isolation as Europeans of course accounted
+for it; there was no medium in the brown population that hummed in
+the city streets.  Hilda could not even bribe a servant without
+knowing how to speak to him.  She ravaged the newspapers; they
+never were more bare of reference to consecrated labours.  The
+nearest approach to one was a paragraph chronicling a social
+evening given by the Wesleyans in Sudder Street, with an exhibition
+of the cinematograph.  In a moment of defiance and determination
+she sent a telegram studiously colourless, "Unable find you wish
+communicate please inform.  A. Cassidy."  Arnold had never ignored
+the name she was born to, in occasional scrupulous moments he
+addressed her by it; he would recognise and understand.  There was
+no reply.
+
+The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it,
+waiting.  His silence adding itself up, brought her a kind of shame
+for the exertions she had made.  She turned with obstinacy from the
+further schemes her ingenuity presented.  Out of the sum of her
+unsuccessful efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them
+increased it.  His behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting
+against it twenty explanations, but not the futility of what she
+had done.  Her resentment of that undermined all the fairness of
+her logic and even triumphed over the sword of her suspense.  She
+never quite gave up the struggle, but in effect she passed the week
+that intervened pinioned in her unreason--bands that vanished as
+she looked at them, only to tie her thrice in another place.
+
+Life became a permanent interrogation point.  Waiting under it,
+with a perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy.  The
+sun of March had been increasing, and the air of one particular
+Saturday afternoon had begun to melt and glow and hang in the
+streets with a kind of inertia, like a curtain that had to be
+parted to be penetrated.  Hilda came into the house and faced the
+stairs with an inclination to leave her body on the ground-floor
+and mount in spirit only.  When she glanced in at the drawing-room
+door and saw Arnold sitting under the blue umbrellas, a little
+paler, a thought more serene than usual, she swept into the room as
+if a tide carried her, and sank down upon a footstool close to him,
+as if it had dropped her there.  He had risen at her appearance, he
+was all himself but rather more the priest, his face of greeting
+had exactly its usual asking intelligence but to her the fact that
+he was normal was lost in the fact that he was near.  He held out
+his hand but she only sought his face, speechless, hugging her
+knees.
+
+"You are overcome by the sun," he said.  "Lie down for a moment,"
+and again he offered her a hand to help her to rise.  She shook her
+head but took his hand, enclosing it in both of hers with a sort of
+happy deliberation, and drew herself up by it, while her eyes,
+shining like dark surfaces of some glorious consciousness within,
+never left his face.  So she stood beside him with her head bowed,
+still dumb.  It was her supreme moment; life never again brought
+her anything like it.  It was not that she confessed so much as
+that she asserted, she made a glowing thing plain, cried out to
+him, still standing silent, the deep-lying meaning of the tangle of
+their lives.  She was shaken by a pure delight, as if she unclosed
+her hand to show him a strange jewel in her palm, hers and his for
+the looking.  The intensity of her consciousness swept round him
+and enclosed him, she knew this profoundly, and had no thought of
+the insulation he had in his robe.  The instant passed; he stood
+unmoved definitely enough, yet some vibration in it reached him,
+for there was surprise in his involuntary backward step.
+
+"You must have thought me curiously rude," he said, as if he felt
+about for an explanation, "but your letters were only given to me
+an hour ago.  We have all been in retreat, you know."
+
+"In RETREAT!" Hilda exclaimed.  "Ah, yes.  How foolish I have been!
+In retreat," she repeated softly, flicking a trace of dust from his
+sleeve.  "Of course."
+
+"It was held in St. Paul's College," Stephen went on, "by Father
+Neede.  Shall we sit down?  And of course at such times no
+communications reach us, no letters or papers."
+
+"No letters or papers," Hilda said, looking at him softly, as it
+were, through the film of the words.  They sat down, he on the
+sofa, she on a chair very near it.  There was another placed at a
+more usual distance, but she seemed incapable of taking the step or
+two toward it, away from him.
+
+Stephen gave himself to the grateful sense of her proximity.  He
+had come to sun himself again in the warmth of her fellowship; he
+was stirred by her emphasis of their separation and reunion.  "And
+what, please," he asked, "have you been doing?  Account to me for
+the time."
+
+"While you have been praying and fasting?  Wondering what you were
+at, and waiting for you to finish.  Waiting," she said, and clasped
+her knees with her intent look again, swaying a little to and fro
+in her content, as if that which she waited for had already come,
+full, and very desirable.
+
+"Have you been reading?--"
+
+"Oh, I have been reading nothing!  You shall never go into retreat
+again," she went on, with a sudden change of expression.  "It is
+well enough for you, but I am not good at fasting.  And I have an
+indulgence," she added, unaware of her soft, bright audacity, "that
+will cover both our cases."
+
+His face uttered aloud his reflection that she was extravagant.
+That it was a pity, but that what was not due to her profession
+might be ascribed to the simple, clear impulse of her temperament--
+that temperament which he had found to be a well of rare sincerity.
+
+"I am not to go any more into retreat?" he said, in grave
+interrogation; but the hint of rebuke in his voice was not in his
+heart, and she knew it.
+
+"No!" she cried.  "You shall not be hidden away like that.  You
+shall not go alive into the tomb and leave me at the door.  Because
+I cannot bear it."
+
+She leaned toward him, and her hand fell lightly on his knee.  It
+was a claiming touch, and there was something in the unfolded
+sweetness of her face that was not ambiguous.  Arnold received the
+intelligence.  It came in a vague grey monitory form, a cloud, a
+portent, a chill menace; but it came, and he paled under it.  He
+seemed to lean upon his hands, pressed one on each side of him to
+the seat of the sofa for support, and he looked in fixed silence at
+hers, upon his knee.  His face seemed to wither, new lines came
+upon it as the impression grew in him; and the glamour faded out of
+hers as she was sharply reminded, looking at him, that he had not
+traversed the waste with her, that she had kept her vigils alone.
+Yet it was all said and done, and there was no repentance in her.
+She only gathered herself together, and fell back, as it were, upon
+her magnificent position.  As she drew her hand away, he dropped
+his face into the cover of his own, leaning his elbow on his knee,
+and there was a pulsing silence.  The instant prolonged itself.
+
+"Are you praying?" Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a
+childlike note; and he shook his head.  There was another,
+instant's pause, and she spoke again.
+
+"Are you so grieved, then," she said, "that this has come upon us?"
+
+Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands, and
+looking at the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the
+heart of the natural man in him came up and stained his face, his
+forehead under the thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above
+the white band that was his badge of difference from other men.
+
+"I--fear--I hardly understand," he said.  The words fell cramped
+and singly, and his lip twitched.  "It--it is impossible to think--"
+He looked as if he dared not lift his head.
+
+One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in
+the wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave
+silence.  Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on
+the brink of her words just long enough to ask whether they would
+hurt him.  Seeing that they would, she nevertheless plunged, but
+with infinite compassion and consideration.  She spoke like an
+agent of Fate, conscious and grieved.
+
+"_I_ understand," she said simply.  "Sometimes, you know, we are
+quicker.  And you in your cell, how should you find out?  That is
+why I must tell you, because, though I am a woman, you are a
+priest.  Partly for that reason I may speak, partly because I love
+you, Stephen Arnold, better and more ardently than you can ever
+love me, or anybody, I think, except perhaps your God.  And I am
+tired of keeping silence."
+
+She was so direct, so unimpassioned, that half his distress turned
+to astonishment, and he faced her as if a calm and reasoned hand
+had been laid upon the confusion in him.  Meeting his gaze, she
+unbarred a floodgate of happy tenderness in her eyes.
+
+"Love!" he gasped in it, "I have nothing to do with that."
+
+"Oh," she said, "you have everything to do with it."
+
+Something thrilled him without asking his permission, assuring him
+that he was a man--until then a placid theory with an unconscious
+basis.  It was therefore a blow to his saintship, or it would have
+been, but he warded it off, flushed and trembling.  It was as if he
+had been ambuscaded.  He had to hold himself from the ignominy of
+flight; he rose to cut his way out, making an effort to strike with
+precision.
+
+"Some perversity has seized you," he said.  The muscles about his
+mouth quivered, giving him a curious aspect.  "You mean nothing of
+what you say."
+
+"Do you believe that?"
+
+"I--I cannot think anything else.  It is the only way I can--I can--
+make excuse."
+
+"Ah, don't excuse me!" she murmured, with an astonishing little gay
+petulance.
+
+"You cannot have thought--" in spite of himself he made a step
+towards the door.
+
+"Oh, I did think--I do think.  And you must not go."  She too stood
+up, and stayed him.  "Let us at least see clearly."  There was a
+persuading note in her voice, one would have thought that she was
+dealing with a patient or a child.  "Tell me," she clasped her
+hands behind her back and looked at him in marvellous simple
+candour, "do I really announce this to you?  Was there not in
+yourself anywhere--deep down--any knowledge of it?"
+
+"I did not guess--I did not dream!"
+
+"And--now?" she asked.
+
+A heavenly current drifted from her, the words rose and fell on it
+with the most dazing suggestion in their soft hesitancy.  It must
+have been by an instinct of her art that her hand went up to the
+cross on Arnold's breast and closed over it, so that he should see
+only her.  The familiar vision of her stood close, looking things
+intolerably new and different.  Again came out of it that sudden
+liberty, that unpremeditated rush and shock in him.  He paled with
+indignation, with the startled resentment of a woman wooed and
+hostile.  His face at last expressed something definite, it was
+anger; he stepped back and caught at his hat.  "I am sorry," he
+said, "I am sorry.  I thought you infinitely above and beyond all
+that."
+
+Hilda smiled and turned away.  If he chose it was his opportunity
+to go, but he stood regarding her, twirling his hat.  She sat down,
+clasping her knees, and looked at the floor.  There was a square of
+sunlight on the carpet, and motes were rising in it.
+
+"Ah well, so did I," she said meditatively, without raising her
+eyes.  Then she leaned back in the chair and looked at him, in her
+level simple way.
+
+"It was a foolish theory," she said, "and--now--I can't understand
+it at all.  I am amazed to find that it even holds good with you."
+
+It was so much in the tone of their usual discussions that Arnold
+was conscious of a lively relief.  The instinct of flight died down
+in him; he looked at her with something like inquiry.
+
+"It will always be to me curious," she went on, "that you could
+have thought your part in me so limited, so poor.  That is enough
+to say.  I find it hard to understand, anybody would, that you
+could take so much good from me and not--so much more."  She opened
+her lips again, but kept back the words.  "Yes," she added, "that
+is enough to say."
+
+But for the colourless face and the tenseness about her lips it
+might have been thought that she definitely abandoned what she had
+learned she could not have.  There was a note of acquiescence and
+regret in her voice, of calm reason above all; and this sense
+reached him, induced him to listen, as he generally listened, for
+anything she might find that would explain the situation.  His
+fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain,
+to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested
+mutely on the cross.  There was a profundity of feeling in them,
+wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative.  "You could not forget
+that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself.  He
+looked into her upturned face and saw that her eyes were swimming.
+
+"Never!" he said, "Never!" but he walked to the nearest chair and
+sat down.  He seemed suddenly endowed with the courage to face this
+problem, and his head, as it rose in the twilight against the
+window, was grave and calm.  Without a word a great tenderness of
+understanding filled the space between them; an interpreting
+compassion went to and fro.  Suddenly a new light dawned in Hilda's
+eyes, she leaned forward and met his in an absorption which caught
+them out of themselves into some space where souls wander, and
+perhaps embrace.  It was a frail adventure upon a gaze, but it
+carried them infinitely far.  The moment died away, neither of them
+could have measured it, and when it had finally ebbed--they were
+conscious of every subsiding throb--the silence remained, like a
+margin for the beauty of it.  They sat immovable, while the light
+faded.  After a time the woman spoke.  "Once before," she began,
+but he put up his hand, and she stopped.  Then as if she would no
+longer be restrained.  "That is all I want," she whispered.  "That
+is enough."
+
+For a time they said very little, looking back upon their divine
+moment; the shadows gathered in the corners of the room and made
+quiet conversation which was almost audible in the pauses.  Then
+Hilda began to speak, steadily, calmly.  You, too, would have
+forgotten her folly in what she found to say, as Arnold did; you
+too would have drawn faith and courage from her face.  One would
+not be irreverent, but if this woman were convicted of the
+unforgiveable sin, she could explain it, and obtain justification
+rather than pardon.  Her horizon had narrowed, she sought now only
+that it should enfold them both.  She begged that he would wipe out
+her insanity, that he would not send her away.  He listened and
+melted to conviction.
+
+"Then I may stay?" she said at the end.
+
+"I am satisfied--if a way can be found."
+
+"I will find a way," she replied.
+
+After which he went back through the city streets to his disciples
+in new humility and profounder joy, knowing that virtue had gone
+out of him.  She in her room where she lodged also considered the
+miracle, twice wonderful in that it asked no faith of her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+It is difficult to be precise about such a thing, but I should
+think that Hilda gave herself to the marvellous aspect of what had
+come and gone between them, for several hours after Arnold left
+her.  It was not for some time, at all events, that she arrived at
+the consideration--the process was naturally downward--that the
+soul of the marvel lay in the exact moment of its happening.
+Nothing could have been more heaven-sent than her precious
+perception, exactly then, that before the shining gift of Arnold's
+spiritual sympathy, all her desire for a lesser thing from him must
+creep away abashed for ever.  Even when the lesser thing, by
+infinitely gradual expansion, again became the greater, it remained
+permanently leavened and lifted in her by the strange and lovely
+incident that had taken for the moment such command of her and of
+him.  She would not question it or reason about it, perhaps with an
+instinct to avert its destruction; she simply drew it deeply into
+her content.  Only its sweet deception did not stay with her, and
+she let that go with open hands.  She wanted, more than ever, the
+whole of Stephen Arnold, all that was so openly the Mission's and
+all that was so evidently God's.  It will be seen that she felt in
+no way compelled to advise him of this her backsliding.  I doubt
+whether such a perversion of her magnificent course of action ever
+occurred to her.  It was magnificent, for it entailed a high
+disregarding stroke; it implied a sublime confidence of what the
+end would be, a capacity to wait and endure.  She smiled buoyantly,
+in the intervals of arranging it, at the idea that Stephen Arnold
+stood beyond her ultimate possession.
+
+There were difficulties, but the moment was favourable to her, more
+favourable than it would have been the year before, or any year but
+this.  Before ten days had passed she was able to write to Arnold
+describing her plan, and she was put to it to keep the glow of
+success out of her letter.  She kept it out, that, and everything
+but a calm and humble statement--any Clarke Brother might have
+dictated it--of what she proposed to do.  Perhaps the intention was
+less obvious than the desire that he should approve it.
+
+The messenger waited long by the entrance to the Mission House for
+an answer, exchanging, sitting on his feet, the profane talk of the
+bazar with the gatekeeper of the Christians.  Stephen was in
+chapel.  There was no service; he had half an hour to rest in and
+he rested there.  He was speculating, in the grateful dimness,
+about the dogma--he had never quite accepted it, though Colquhoun
+had--of the intercessory power of the souls of saints.  A converted
+Brahmin, an old man, had died the day before.  Arnold luxuriated in
+the humility of thinking that he would be glad of any good word
+dear old Nourendra Lal could say for him.  The chapel was
+deliciously refined.  The scent of fresh cut flowers floated upon
+the continual presence of the incense; a lily outlined its head
+against the tall carved altarpiece the Brothers had brought from
+Damascus.  The seven brass lamps that hung from the rafters above
+the altar rails were also Damascene, carved and pierced so that the
+light in them was a still thing like a prayer; and the place
+breathed vague meanings which did not ask understanding.  It was a
+refuge from the riot and squalor of the whitewashed streets with a
+double value and a treble charm--I.H.S. among plaster gods, a
+sanctuary in the bazar.  Stephen sat in it motionless, with his
+lean limbs crossed in front of him, until the half-hour was up;
+then he bent his knee before the altar and went out to meet a
+servant at the door with Hilda's letter.  The chapel opened upon an
+upper verandah, he crossed it to get a better light and stood to
+read with his back half turned upon the comers and goers.
+
+It was her first communication since they parted, and in spite of
+its colourlessness it seemed to lay strong eager hands upon him,
+turning his shoulder that way, upon the world, bending his head
+over the page.  He had not dwelt much upon their strange
+experience, in the days that followed.  It had retreated, for him,
+behind the veil of tender mystery with which he shrouded, even from
+his own eyes, the things that lay between his soul and God.  The
+space from that day to this had been more than usually full of
+ministry; its pure uses had fallen like snow, blotting and
+deadening the sudden wonder that blossomed then.  Latterly he had
+hardly thought of it.
+
+So far was he removed, so deeply drawn again within his familiar
+activities, that he regarded Hilda's letter for an instant with a
+lip of censure, as if, for some reason, it should not have been
+admitted.  It was, in a manner, her physical presence, the words
+expanded into her, through it she walked back into his life, with
+an interrogation.  Standing there by the pillar he became gradually
+aware of the weight of the interrogation.
+
+A passing Brother cast at him the sweet smile of the cloister.
+Arnold stopped him and transferred an immediate duty, which the
+other accepted with a slightly exaggerated happiness.  They might
+have been girls together, with their apologies and protestations.
+The other Brother went on in a little glow of pleasure, Arnold
+turned back into the chapel, carrying, it seemed to him, a woman's
+life in his hand.
+
+He took his seat and folded his arms almost eagerly; there was a
+light of concentration in his eye and a line of compression about
+his lips which had not marked his meditation upon Nourendra Lal.
+The vigour in his face suggested that he found a kind of athletic
+luxury in what he had to think about.  Brother Colquhoun, with his
+flat hat clasped before his breast, passed down the aisle.  Stephen
+looked up with a trace of impatience.  Presently he rose hurriedly
+as if he remembered something, and went and knelt before one of
+several paintings that hung upon the chapel walls.  They were old
+copies of great works, discoloured and damaged.  They had sailed
+round the Cape to India when the century was young, and a lady
+friend of the Mission had bought them at the sale of the effects of
+a ruined Begum.  Arnold was one of those who could separate them
+from their incongruous history and consecrate them over again.  He
+often found them helpful when he sought to lift his spirit, and in
+any special matter a special comfort.  He bent for ten minutes
+before a Crucifixion, and then hastened back to his place.  Only
+one reflection corrected the vigorous satisfaction with which he
+thought out Hilda's proposition.  That disturbed him in the middle
+of it, and took the somewhat irrelevant form of a speculation as to
+whether the events of their last meeting should have had any place
+in his Thursday confession.  He was able to find almost at once a
+conscientious negative for it, and it did not recur again.
+
+He got up reluctantly when the Mission bell sounded, and indeed he
+had come to the end of a very absorbing interest.  His decision was
+final against Hilda's scheme.  His worn experience cried out at the
+sacrifice in it without the illumination--which it would certainly
+lack--of religious faith.  She confessed to the lack, and that was
+all she had to say about her motive, which, of course, placed him
+at an immense disadvantage in considering it.  But the question
+then descended to another plane, became merely a doubt as to the
+most useful employment of energy, and that doubt nobody could
+entertain long, nobody of reasonable breadth of view, who had ever
+seen her expressing the ideals of the stage.  Arnold did his best
+to ward off all consideration which he could suspect of a personal
+origin, but his inveterate self-sacrifice slipped in and counted,
+naturally enough, under another guise, against her staying.
+
+He went to his room and wrote to Hilda at once, the kindest,
+simplest of letters, but conveying a definitely negative note.  He
+would have been perhaps more guarded, but it was so plainly his
+last word to her; Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure
+of his people in ten days' time upon every blank wall.  So he gave
+himself a little latitude, he let in an undercurrent of gentle
+reminiscence, of serious assurance as to the difference she had
+made.  And when he had finally bade her begone to the light and
+fulness of her own life, and fastened up his letter, he
+deliberately lifted it to his lips and placed a trembling, awkward
+kiss upon it, like the kiss of an old man, perfunctory yet bearing
+a tender intention.
+
+The Livingstones and Duff Lindsay had come back, the people from
+Surrey having been sped upon their way to the Far East.  Stephen
+remembered with more than his usual relish an engagement to dine
+that evening in Middleton Street.  He involuntarily glanced at his
+watch.  It was half-past one.  The afternoon looked arid,
+stretching between.  Consulting his tablets he found that he had
+nothing that was really of any consequence to do.  There were
+items, but they were unimportant, transferable.  He had dismissed
+Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she helped to illumine showed
+seductively at the end of his day.  He made an errand involving a
+long walk, and came back at an hour which left nothing but evensong
+between him and eight o'clock.
+
+He was suddenly aware as he talked to her later, of a keener edge
+to his appreciation of the charm of Alicia Livingstone.  Her
+voyage, he assured her, had done her all the good in the world.
+Her delicate bloom had certainly been enhanced by it, and the
+graceful spring of her neck and her waist seemed to have its
+counterpart in a freshened poise of the agreeable things she found
+to say.  It was delightful the way she declared herself quite a
+different being, and the pleasure with which she moved, dragging
+fascinating skirts behind her, about the room.  She made more of an
+impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had ever done
+before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had greater
+relief, and her charm more freedom.  Lindsay was there, and Arnold
+glanced from one to the other of them, first with a start then with
+a smile, at the recollection of Hilda's conception of their
+relations.  If this were a type and instance of hopeless love he
+had certainly misread all the songs and sayings.  He kept the idea
+in his mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a
+pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in
+his curious acumen in such an unwonted direction.  It was a very
+flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from
+him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed
+him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St.
+Barnabas.  It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation
+confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned across him toward
+Lindsay with occasional references to Laura Filbert, apparently
+full of light-heartedness, references which Duff received in the
+square-shouldered matter-of-course fashion of his countrymen
+approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe.  It was
+gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the
+indrawing of his under-lip, a plaintive twist of expression which
+spoke upon the faces of quite half the Order, of patience under
+privation.
+
+The atmosphere was one of congratulation, the week's Gazette had
+transformed Surgeon-Major Livingstone into Surgeon-Lieutenant-
+Colonel.  The officer thus promoted, in a particularly lustrous
+shirt bosom, made a serious social effort to correspond, and
+succeeded in producing more than one story of the Principal Medical
+Officer with her Majesty's forces in India, which none of them had
+heard before.  They were all delighted at Herbert's step, he was
+just the kind of person to get a step, and to get it rather
+early; a sense of the propriety of it mingled with the general
+gratification.  There was a feeling of ease among them, too, of the
+indefeasibly won, which the event is apt to bring even when the
+surgeon-lieutenant-colonelcy is most strikingly deserved.  With no
+strain imaginable one could see the relaxation.
+
+"We can't do much in celebration," Lindsay was saying, "but I've
+got a box at the theatre, if you'll come.  Our people had some
+pomfret and oysters over on ice from Bombay this morning, and I've
+sent my share to Bonsard to see what he can do with it for supper.
+Jack Cummins and Lady Dolly are coming.  By the way, what do you
+think the totalizator paid Lady Dolly on Saturday--six thousand!"
+
+"Rippin'," Herbert agreed.  "We'll all come--at least--I don't
+know.  What do you say, Arnold?"
+
+"Of course Stephen will come," Alicia urged.  "Why not?"  It was
+putting him and his gown at once beyond the operation of vulgar
+prejudice, intimating that they quite knew him for what he was.
+
+"What's the piece?" Herbert inquired.
+
+"Oh, the piece isn't up to much, I'm afraid, only that Hilda Howe
+is worth seeing in almost anything."
+
+"Thanks," Stephen put in, "but I think, thanks very much, I would
+rather not."
+
+"I remember," Alicia said, "you were with us the night she played
+in The Offence of Galilee.  I don't wonder that you do not wish to
+disturb that impression."
+
+Stephen fixed his eyes upon a small pyramid of crystallised
+cherries immediately in front of him, and appeared to consider,
+austerely, what form his reply should take.  There was an instant's
+perceptible pause, and then he merely bowed toward Alicia as if
+vaguely to acknowledge the kindness of her recollection.  "I
+think," he said again, "that I will not accompany you to-night, if
+you will be good enough to excuse me."
+
+"You must excuse us both," Alicia said definitely, "I should much
+rather stay at home and talk to Stephen."
+
+At this they all cried out, but Miss Livingstone would not change
+her mind.  "I haven't seen him for three weeks," she said, with
+gentle effrontery, making nothing of his presence, "and he's much
+more improving than either of you.  I also shall choose the better
+part."
+
+"How you can call it that, with Hilda in the balance--" Duff
+protested.
+
+"But then you've invited Lady Dolly.  After winning six thousand
+there will be no holding Lady Dolly.  She'll be capable of cat-
+calls!  How I should love," Alicia went on, "to have Hilda meet
+her.  She would be a mine to Hilda."
+
+"For pity's sake," cried her brother, "stop asking Hilda and people
+who are a mine to Hilda!  It's too perceptible, the way she digs in
+them."
+
+"You dear old thing, you're quite clever to-night!  What difference
+does it make?  They never know--they never dream!  I wish I could
+dig."  Alicia looked pensively at the olive between her finger and
+thumb.
+
+"Thank Heaven you can't," Duff said warmly.  It was a little odd,
+the personal note.  Alicia's eyes remained upon the olive.
+
+"It's all she lives for."
+
+"Well," Duff declared, "I can imagine higher ends."
+
+"You're not abusing Hilda!" Alicia said, addressing the olive.
+
+"Not at all.  Only vindicating you."
+
+It did single them out, this fencing.  Herbert and Arnold sat as
+spectators, pushed, in a manner, aside.
+
+"I suppose she will be off soon," Livingstone said.
+
+"Oh, dreadfully soon.  On the fifteenth.  I had a note from her to-
+day."
+
+"Did she say she was going?" Stephen asked quickly.
+
+"She mentioned the Company--she is the Company surely."
+
+"Oh, undoubtedly.  May I--might I ask for a little more soda-water,
+Alicia?"  He made the request so formally that she glanced at him
+with surprise.
+
+"Please do--but isn't it very odious, by itself, that way?  I
+suppose we shouldn't leave out Hamilton Bradley--he certainly
+counts."
+
+"For how much?" inquired her brother.  "He's going to pieces."
+
+"Hilda can pull him together again," Lindsay said incautiously.
+
+"Has she an influence for good--over him?" Stephen inquired, and
+cleared his throat.  He caught a glance exchanged, and frowned.
+
+"Oh yes," Duff said, "I fancy it is for good.  For good, certainly.
+The odd part of it is that he began by having an influence over her
+which she declares improved her acting.  So that was for good, too,
+as it turned out.  I think she makes too much of him.  To my mind
+he speaks like a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like
+a bit of consecrated stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and
+his thin lips, and his thin eyebrows.  Personally, I'm sick of his
+eyebrows."
+
+"They'll end by marrying," said Surgeon-Lieut.-Colonel Livingstone.
+
+"HERBERT!  How little you know her!"
+
+"It's possible enough," Duff said, "especially if she finds him in
+any way necessary to her production of herself.  Hilda has knocked
+about too much to have many illusions.  One is pretty sure she
+would place that first."
+
+"You are saying a thing which is monstrous!" cried Alicia.
+
+Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction.  "She'll have to
+marry him to get rid of him," he said.  "Fancy the opportunities of
+worrying her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!"
+
+"Oh, if you think Hilda could be WORRIED into anything!" Miss
+Livingstone exclaimed derisively.  "If the man were irritating, do
+you suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means?--"
+
+"She would have him put in irons, no doubt," Herbert retorted, "or
+locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the ship's
+butcher."
+
+The three laughed immoderately, and Stephen, looking up, came in at
+the end with a smile.  Alicia pronounced her brother too absurd,
+and unfitted by nature to know anything about creatures like Hilda
+Howe.  "A mere man to begin with," she said.  "You haven't the
+ghost of a temperament, Herbert; you know you haven't."
+
+"He got's a lovely bedside manner," Lindsay remarked, "and that's
+the next thing to it."
+
+"Rubbish!  I don't want to hurry you," Alicia glanced at the watch
+on her wrist, "but unless you and Herbert want to miss half the
+first act you had better be off.  Stephen and I will have our
+coffee comfortably in the drawing-room and find what excuses we can
+for you."
+
+But Stephen put out his hand with a movement of slightly rigid
+deprecation.
+
+"If it is not too vacillating of me," he said, "and I may be
+forgiven, I think I will change my mind, and go.  I have no
+business to break up your party, and besides, I shall probably not
+have another opportunity--I should rather like to go.  To the
+theatre, of course, that is.  Not to Bonsard's, thanks very much."
+
+"Oh, do come on to Bonsard's," Lindsay said, and Alicia protested
+that he would miss the best of Lady Dolly, but Stephen was firm.
+Bonsard's was beyond the limit of his indulgence.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Only the Sphinx confronted them after all when they arrived at the
+theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly.  The older feminine presentment
+sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the
+curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the
+front of the box.  Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows,
+which were assisting her a good deal with the house in exploring
+and being explored, enabling Colonel John Cummins, who sat by her
+side, to observe how very perfect and adorable the cut of her
+bodice was.  Since Colonel Cummins was accustomed to say in moments
+when his humour escaped his discretion, things highly appreciative
+of bodices, the role of Lady Dolly's elbows could hardly be
+dismissed as unimportant.  Moreover, the husband attached to the
+elbows belonged to the Department of which Colonel John was the
+head, so that they rested, one may say, upon a very special plane.
+
+Alicia disturbed it with the necessity of taking Colonel Cummins
+place, which Lady Dolly accepted with admirable spirit; assuring
+the usurper, with the most engaging candour, that she simply ought
+never to be seen without turquoises.  "Believe it or not as you
+like, but I love you better every time I see you in that necklace."
+Lady Dolly clasped her hands, with her fan in them, in the
+abandonment of her affection, and "love you better" floated back
+and dispersed itself among the men.  Alicia smiled the necessary
+acknowledgment.  All the women she knew made compliments to her; it
+was a kind of cult among them.  The men had sometimes an air of
+envying their freedom of tongue.  "Don't say that," she returned
+lightly, "or Herbert will never give me any diamonds."  She too
+looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice, but said nothing.  It
+was doubtless precisely because she disdained certain forms of
+feminine barter that she got so much for nothing.
+
+"And where," demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, "did you
+find that dear sweet little priest?  Do introduce him to me--at
+least by and by, when I've thought of something to say.  Let me
+see, wasn't it Good Friday last week?  I'll ask him if he had hot-
+cross buns--or do people eat those on Boxing Day?  Pancakes come in
+somewhere, if one could only be sure!"
+
+Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box.  His senses were
+filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh
+correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to
+spring from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front,
+a kind of lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to
+enjoy.  They were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed
+to proceed partly from the usual sources and partly from their own
+personalities; he saw them in a way which underlined their
+significance at every point.  It seemed to Stephen that in a manner
+he profaned this temple of what he held to be poorest and cheapest
+in life, a paradox of which he was but dimly aware in his
+dejection.  A sharp impression of his physical inferiority to the
+other men assailed him; his appreciation of their muscular
+shoulders had a rasp in it.  For once the poverty of spirit to
+which he held failed to offer him a refuge, his eye wandered
+restlessly as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing
+most present with him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck
+of his cassock.  He fixed his attention presently in a climax of
+passive discomfort on the curtain, where unconsciously, his gaze
+crept with a subtle interrogation in it to the wide eyeballs of the
+Sphinx.
+
+The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production,
+in the middle of the week, and although the gallery and the rupee
+seats under it were nearly empty.  The piece accounted for both.
+When Duff Lindsay said at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he
+spoke, I fancy, from the nearest point of view he could take to
+that of the Order of St. Barnabas.  As a matter of fact, The Victim
+of Virtue was up to a very great deal, but its points were so
+delicate that one must have been educated rather broadly to grasp
+them, which is again perhaps a foolish contrariety of terms.  At
+all events they carried no appeal to the theatre-goers from the
+sailing ships in the river or the regiments in the fort, who turned
+as one than that night to Jimmy Finnigan.
+
+Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect.  He
+savoured the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the
+Saturday Review; he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the
+productions of this particular playwright through that medium for a
+long time.  They formed a manifestation of the outer world fit
+enough to draw a glance of speculation from the inner; their author
+was an acrobat of ideas.  Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes
+of the angels, yet we have the habit of supposing that they
+sometimes look down upon us.  It was thus, if the parallel is not
+exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of The Victim of
+Virtue.  His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased
+playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the
+basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such
+things.  Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed
+promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips as it were, against the
+rising of the curtain.  He thought of Hilda separately, and he
+looked for her upon the boards with the simplicity of a desire to
+see the woman he knew.
+
+When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was
+to remain with him always as his last impression of an art from
+which in all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned.
+From the aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she
+was mondaine.  Her dress, of some indefinite, slight white
+material, clasped at the waist with a belt that gave the beam of
+turquoises and the gleam of silver, ministered as much to the
+capricious ideal of the moment as to the lines and curves of the
+person it adorned.  The set was the inevitable modern drawing-room,
+and she sat well out on a sofa, with her hands, in long black
+gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward on each side of her.  It was
+as if she pushed her body forward in an impulse to rise, her rigid
+arms thrust her shoulders up a little and accentuated the swell of
+her bosom.  It was a vivid, a staccato attitude; it expressed a
+temperament, a character, fifty other things; but especially it
+epitomised the restraints and the licenses of a world of drawing-
+rooms.  In that first brief mute instant of disclosure she was all
+that she presently, by voice and movement, proclaimed herself to
+be--so dazzling and complete that Stephen literally blinked at the
+revelation.  He made an effort, for a moment or two, to pursue and
+detect the woman who had been his friend; then the purpose of his
+coming gradually faded from his mind, and he stood with folded arms
+and absorbed eyes watching the other, the Mrs. Halliday, on the
+sofa, setting about the fulfilment of a purple destiny.
+
+The play proceeded and Stephen did not move--did not wince.  When
+Mrs. Halliday, whose mate was exacting, exclaimed, "The greatest
+apostle of expediency was St. Paul.  He preached 'wives love your
+husbands,'" he even permitted himself the ghost of a smile.  At one
+point he wished himself familiar with the plot; it was when
+Hamilton Bradley came jauntily on as Lord Ingleton, assuring Mrs.
+Halliday that immorality was really only shortsightedness.  Lady
+Dolly in front, repeated Lord Ingleton's phrase with ingenuous
+wonder.  "I know it's clever," she insisted, "but what does it
+mean?  Now that other thing--what was it?--'Subtract vice, and
+virtue is what is left'--that's an easy one.  Write it down on your
+cuff for me, will you, Colonel Cummins?  I SHALL be so sick if I
+forget it."
+
+Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of
+Lady Dolly.  He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the
+play, wholly involved in an effort to keep its current and
+direction through the floating debris of constrained sayings with
+which it was encumbered; to know in advance whither it was carrying
+its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton would accompany.  When
+Lord Ingleton paused as it were to beg four people to "have nothing
+to do with sentiment--it so often leads to conviction," and the
+house murmured its amusement, Arnold shifted his shoulders
+impatiently.  "How inconsistent," Lord Ingleton reproached Mrs.
+Halliday a moment later, "to wear gloves on your hands and let your
+thoughts go candid."  Arnold turned to Duff.  "There's no excuse
+for that," he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda's rejoinder
+and did not hear him.
+
+At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday
+to her husband's divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing
+his hands with gratification at having made two such clever women
+"aware of each other," Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling
+to discuss the piece with the rest of the party.  As he left the
+box to walk up and down the corridor outside where it was cooler,
+he heard the voice of Colonel Cummins lifted in further quotation,
+"'To be good AND charming--what a sinful superfluity!'  I'm sure
+nobody ever called you superfluous, Lady Dolly," and was vividly
+aware of the advisability of taking himself and his Order out of
+the theatre.  He had not been gratified, or even from any point
+appealed to.  Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so perfect
+that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him.  He
+had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the
+restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at
+the problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust.  He
+was too far from the circle of her modern influence to consider her
+with anything but impatience if he had met her original person, and
+her reflection, her reproduction seemed to him frivolous and
+meaningless.  If he went then, however, he would go as he came, in
+so far as the play was concerned; the first act, relying altogether
+upon the jugglery of its dialogue, gave no clue to anything.  He
+owed it to Hilda after all to see the piece out.  It was only fair
+to give her a chance to make the best of it.  He decided that it
+was worth a personal sacrifice to give it her, and went back.
+
+He was sufficiently indignant with the leading idea of the play,
+and sufficiently absorbed in its progress, at the end of the second
+act, to permit Lady Dolly to capture him before it occurred to him
+that he had the use of his legs.  Her enthusiasm was so great that
+it reduced him to something like equivocation.  She wanted to know
+if anything could be more splendid than Mr. Bradley as Lord
+Ingleton; she confided to Stephen that that was what she called
+REAL wickedness, the kind that did the most harm, and invited him
+by inference, to a liberal judgment of stupid sinners.  He sat
+emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes nervously fugitive
+from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the third act began.
+Then he gave place with embarrassed alacrity to Colonel Cummins,
+and folded his arms again at the back of the box.
+
+Before it was finished he had the gratification of recognising
+at least one Hilda that he knew.  The newspapers found in her
+interpretation the development of a soul, and one remembered,
+reading them, that a cliche is a valuable thing in a hurry.  A
+phrase which spoke of a soul bruised out of life and rushing to
+annihilation would have been more precise.  The demand upon her
+increased steadily as the act went on, and as she met it there
+slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities of motive
+and of passion.  She offered to the shaping circumstance rich
+material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her
+destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away she did it
+with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movement that
+was essentially of herself.
+
+The moment of it had a bold gruesomeness that caught the breath--a
+disinterment on the stage in search of letters that would prove the
+charge against the second year of Mrs. Halliday's married life, her
+letters buried with the poet.  It was an advantage which only the
+husband of Mrs. Halliday would have claimed to bring so helpless a
+respondent before even the informal court at the graveyard; but it
+gave Hilda a magnificent opportunity of wild, mad apostrophe to the
+skull, holding it tenderly with both hands, while Lord Ingleton
+smiled appreciatively in advance of the practical benevolence which
+was to sustain the lady through the divorce court, and in the final
+scene offer to her and to the prejudices of the British public the
+respectability of his name.
+
+It was over with a rush at the end, leaving the audience uncertain
+whether after all enough attention had been paid to that tradition
+of the footlights which insists on so nice a sense of opprobrium
+and compensation, but convinced of its desire to applaud.  Duff
+Lindsay turned as the wave of clapping spent itself, to say to
+Stephen that he had never respected Hamilton Bradley's acting so
+much.  He said it to Herbert Livingstone instead; the priest had
+disappeared.
+
+The outgoers looked at Arnold curiously as he made his way among
+them in a direction which was not that of the exit.  He went with
+hurried purpose in the face of them all toward the region, badly
+lighted and imperfectly closed, which led to the rear of the stage.
+He opened doors into dark closets, and one which gave upon the
+road, retraced his unfamiliar steps and asked a question, to which--
+it was so unusual from one in his habit--he received a hesitating
+but correct reply.  A moment later he passed Mr. Llewellyn
+Stanhope, who stood in his path with a hostile stare, and got out
+of it with a deferential bow, and knocked at a door upon which was
+pasted the name, in large red letters cut from a poster, of Miss
+Hilda Howe.  It was a little ajar, so he entered, when she cried
+"Come in!" with the less hesitation.  Hilda sat on the single chair
+the place contained, in the dress and make-up of the last scene.  A
+servant, who looked up incuriously, was unlacing her shoes.
+Various garments hung about on nails driven into the unpainted
+walls, others overflowed from a packing-box in one corner.  A
+common teakwood dressing-table held make up saucers and powder-
+puffs and some remnants of cold fowl which had not been partaken
+of, apparently, with the assistance of a knife and fork.  A candle
+stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the looking-
+glass, and there was no other light.  On the floor a pair of stays,
+old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern.  The place looked sordid
+and miserable, and Hilda sitting in the middle of it, still in the
+yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that
+range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous.
+Stephen stood in the doorway grasping the handle, saying nothing,
+and an instant passed before she knew with certainty, in the
+wretched light, that it was he.  Then she sprang up and made a step
+toward him as if toward victory and reward, but checked herself in
+time.  "Is it possible!" she exclaimed.  "I did not know you were
+in the theatre."
+
+"Yes," he said, with moderation, "I have seen this--this damnable
+play."
+
+"Damnable?  Oh!--"
+
+"It has caused me," he went on, "to regret the substance of my
+letter this morning.  I failed to realise that this was the kind of
+work you devote your life to.  I now see that you could not escape
+its malign influence--that no women could.  I now think that the
+alternative that has been revealed to you, of remaining in
+Calcutta, is a chance of escape offered you by God Himself.  Take
+it.  I withdraw my foolish, ignorant opposition."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "do you really think--"
+
+"Take it," he repeated, and closed the door.
+
+Hilda sat still for some time after the servant had finished
+unlacing her shoes.  A little tender smile played oddly about her
+carmined lips.  "Dear heart," she said aloud, "I was going to."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+"I would simply give anything to be there," Miss Livingstone said,
+with a look of sincere desire.
+
+"I should love to have you, but it isn't possible.  You might meet
+men you knew who had been invited by particular lady friends among
+the company."
+
+"Oh, well, that of course would be odious."
+
+"Very, I should think," Hilda agreed.  "You must be satisfied with
+a faithful report of it.  I promise you that."
+
+"You have asked Mr. Lindsay," Alicia complained.
+
+"That's quite a different thing.  And if I hadn't, Llewellyn
+Stanhope would; Stanhope cherishes Duff as he cherishes the critic
+of the Chronicle.  He refers to him as a pillar of the legitimate.
+Whenever he begs me to turn the Norwegian crank, he says, 'I'm sure
+Mr. Lindsay would come.'"
+
+Miss Howe was at the top of the staircase in Middleton Street, on
+the point of departure.  It was to be the night of her last
+appearance for the season and her benefit, followed by a supper in
+her honour, at which Mr. Stanhope and his company would take leave
+of those whose acquaintance, as he expressed it, business and
+pleasure had given them during the months that were past.  It was
+this function that Alicia, at the top of the staircase, so ardently
+desired to attend.
+
+"No, I won't kiss you," Hilda said, as the other put her cool cheek
+forward; "I'm so divinely happy--some of it might escape."
+
+Alicia's voice pursued her as she ran downstairs.  "Remember," she
+said, "I don't approve.  I don't at all agree either with my
+reverend cousin or with you.  I think you ought to find some other
+way, or let it go.  Go home instead; go straight to London and
+insist on your chance.  After six weeks you will have forgotten the
+name of his Order."
+
+Hilda looked back with a smile.  Her face was splendid with the
+dawn and the promise of success.  "Don't say that," she cried.
+
+Alicia, leaning down, was visited by a flash of quotation.  "Well,"
+she said, "nothing in this life becomes you like the leaving of
+it," and went back to her room to write to Laura Filbert in
+Plymouth.  She wrote often to Miss Filbert, at Duff's request.  It
+gratified her that she was able, without a pang, to address four
+pages of pleasantly colourless communication to Mr. Lindsay's
+fiancee.  Her letters stood for a medicine surprisingly easy to
+take, aimed at the convalescence which she already anticipated in
+the future immediately beyond Duff's miserable marriage.  If that
+event had promised felicitously she would have faced it, one
+fancies, with less sanguine anticipations for herself: but the
+black disaster that rode on with it brought her certain aids to the
+spirit, certain hopes of herself.  Laura's prompt replies, with
+their terrible margins and painstaking solecisms, came to be things
+Miss Livingstone looked forward to.  She read them with a beating
+heart, however, in the unconscious apprehension of some revelation
+of improvement.  She was quite unaware of it, but she entertained
+towards the Simpsons an attitude of misgiving in this regard.
+
+Hilda went on about her business.  As usual her business was
+important and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last
+day.  She drove about from place to place in the hot, slatternly
+city, putting more than her usual vigour and directness into all
+she did.  It seemed to her that the sunlight burning on the tiles,
+pouring through the crowded streets, had more than ever a vivid
+note; and so much spoke to her, came to her, from the profuse and
+ingenuous life which streamed about her, that she leaned a little
+forward to meet it with happy eyes and tender lips that said, "I
+know.  I see."  She was living for the moment which should exhale
+itself somewhere about midnight after the lights had gone out on
+her last appearance--living for it as a Carmelite might live for
+the climax of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that
+beyond the cell and the grating she saw the movement and the colour
+and the passion of a wider life.  All Hilda's splendid vitality
+went into her intention, of which she was altogether mistress,
+riding it and reining it in a straight course through the
+encumbered hours.  It keyed her to a finer and more eager
+susceptibility; and the things she saw stayed with her, passing
+into a composite day which the years were hardly to dim for her.
+
+She could live like that, for the purposes of a period, wrought up
+to immense keenness of sense and brilliancy of energy, making
+steadily for some point of feeling or achievement flashing
+gloriously on the horizon.  It is already plain, perhaps, that she
+rejoiced in such strokes, and that life as she found it worth
+living was marked by a succession of them.
+
+She had kept, even from Lindsay, what she meant to do.  When she
+stepped from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of
+the evening, with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's--
+no eight-anna bazar confections edged with silver tinsel--it
+occurred to her that this reticence was not altogether fair to so
+constant a friend.  He was there, keen and eager as ever in all
+that concerned her, foremost with his congratulations on the
+smiling fringe of the party assembled to do her honour.  It was a
+party of some brilliance in its way, though its way was diverse;
+there was no steady glow.  Fillimore said of the company that it
+comprised all the talent, and Fillimore, Editor of the Indian
+Sportsman and Racing Gazelle, was a judge.  He said it to Hagge, of
+the Bank of Hindostan, who could hardly have been an owner on three
+hundred rupees a month without conspicuous ability disconnected
+with his ledgers; and Hagge looked gratified.  Though so promising,
+he was young.  Lord Bobby was there from Government House.  Lord
+Bobby always accompanied the talent, who were very kind to him.  He
+was talking when Hilda arrived to the Editor of the Indian Empire,
+who wanted to find out the date of her Excellency's fancy dress
+party for children, in order that he might make a leaderette of it;
+but Lord Bobby couldn't remember--had to promise to drop him a
+line.  Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with coldness
+because the Sportsman had discovered too many virtues in his
+Musquito, exalted her indeed into a favourite for Saturday's hurdle
+race, a notability for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest.
+"They say," Fillimore had written, "that Musquito has been seen
+jumping by moonlight"--the sort of thing to spoil any book.
+Fillimore was an acute and weary-looking little man, with a
+peculiarly sweet smile and an air of cynicism which gave to his
+lightest word a dangerous and suspicious air.  It was rumoured in
+official circles that he had narrowly escaped beheading for
+pointing out too ironically the disabilities of a Viceroy who
+insisted on reviewing the troops from a cushioned carriage with the
+horses taken out.  Fillimore seemed to think that if nature had not
+made such a nobleman a horseman, the Queen-Empress should not have
+made him Governor-General of India.  Fillimore was full of
+prejudices.  Gianacchi, however, found it impossible to treat him
+coldly.  His smoothness of temperament stood in the way.  Instead,
+he imparted the melodious information that Musquito had pecked
+badly twice at Tollygunge that morning, and smiled with pathetic
+philosophy.  "Always let 'em use their noses," said Fillimore, and
+there seemed to be satire in it.  Fillimore certainly had a flair,
+and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of him, "What's the dead
+bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?" he put it generously at her
+service.  Among the friends of Mr. Stanhope and his company were
+also several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect, with
+the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange--gentlemen of high
+finance, who wrote their names at the end of directors' reports,
+but never in the visitors' book at Government House, who were
+little more to the Calcutta world than published receipts for so
+many lakhs, except when they were seen now and then driving, in
+fleet dogcarts across the Maidan toward comfortable suburban
+residences where ladies were not entertained.  They were extremely,
+curiously, devoted to business; but if they allowed themselves any
+amusement other than company promoting, it was the theatre, of
+which their appreciation had sometimes an odd relation to the
+merits of performance.  This supper, on the part of Miss Beryl
+Stace and one or two others of Mr. Stanhope's artistes, might have
+been considered a return of hospitality to these gentlemen, since
+the suburban residences stood lavishly open to the profession.
+
+Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that
+looked for the sentiment, the pity of things, would have
+distinguished at once on about half the faces, especially those of
+the women, the used, underlined look that spoke of the continual
+play of muscle and forcing of feeling.  It gave them a shabbily
+complicated air, contrasting in a strained and sorry way even, with
+the countenances of the brokers and bankers, where nature had laid
+on a smooth wash and experience had not interfered.  They were all
+gay and enthusiastic as Miss Howe entered, they loafed forward,
+broad shirt-fronts lustrous, fat hands in financial pockets, with
+their admiration, and Fillimore put out his cigarette.  Hilda came
+down among them from the summit of her achievement, clasping their
+various hands.  They were all personally responsible for her
+success, she made them feel that, and they expanded in the
+conviction.  She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality,
+subtly drawing from every human flavour in the room the power to
+hold and show something akin to it in herself, a fugitive
+assimilation floating in the lamplight with the odour of the
+flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the occasion.  They
+looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling attraction,
+they told each other that she was in great form.  Mr. Fillimore was
+of the opinion that she couldn't be outclassed at the Lyceum, and
+Mr. Hagge responded with vivacity that there were few places where
+she wouldn't stretch the winner's neck.  The feast was not after
+all one of great bounty, Mr. Stanhope justly holding that the
+opportunity, the little gathering, was the thing, and it was not
+long before the moment of celebration arrived for which the
+gentlemen of the Stock Exchange, to judge from their undrained
+glasses, seemed to be reserving themselves.  There certainly had
+been one tin of pate, and it circulated at that end; on the other
+hand the ladies had all the fondants.  So that when Mr. Llewellyn
+Stanhope rose with the sentiment of the evening he found
+satisfaction, if not repletion, in the regards turned upon him.
+
+Llewellyn got up with modest importance, and ran a hand through his
+yellow hair, not dramatically, but with the effect of collecting
+his ideas.  He leaned a little forward, he was extremely, happily
+conspicuous.  The attention of the two lines of faces seemed to
+overcome him, for an instant, with dizzy pleasure; Hilda's beside
+him was bent a little, waiting.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Stanhope, looking with precision
+up and down the table to be still more inclusive, "we have met
+together to-night in honour of a lady who has given this city more
+pleasure in the exercise of her profession than can be said of any
+single performer during the last twenty years.  Cast your eye back
+over the theatrical record of Calcutta for that space of time, and
+you yourselves will admit that there has been nobody that could be
+said to have come within a mile of her shadow, if I may use the
+language of metaphor."  (Applause, led by Mr. Fillimore.)  "I would
+ask you to remember, at the same time, that this pleasure has been
+of a superior class.  I freely admit that this is a great
+satisfaction to me personally.  Far be it from me to put myself
+forward on this auspicious occasion, but, ladies and gentlemen, if
+I have one ambition more than another, it is to promote the noble
+cause of the unfettered drama.  To this I may say I have been vowed
+from the cradle, by a sire who was well-known in the early days of
+the metropolis of Sydney as a pioneer of the great movement which
+has made the dramatic talent of Australia what it is.  To-day a
+magnificent theatre rises on the site forever consecrated to me by
+those paternal labours, but--but I can never forget it.  In Miss
+Hilda Howe I have found a great coadjutor, and one who is willing
+to consecrate her royal abilities in the same line as myself, so
+that we have been able to maintain a high standard of production
+among you, prices remaining as usual.  I have to thank you, as
+representing the public of the Indian capital, for the kind support
+which has been so encouraging to Miss Howe, the Company, and myself
+personally, during the past season.  Many a time ladies and
+gentlemen of my profession have said to me, 'Mr. Stahhope, why do
+you go to Calcutta?  That city is a death-trap for professionals,'
+and now the past season proves that I was right and they were
+wrong; and the magnificent houses, the enthusiasm, and the
+appreciation that have greeted our efforts, especially on the
+Saturday evening performances, show plainly enough that when a good
+thing is available the citizens of Calcutta won't be happy till
+they get it.  Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to join me in
+drinking the health, happiness, and prosperity of Miss Hilda Howe!"
+
+"Miss Howe!"  "Miss Howe!"  "Miss Hilda Howe!"  In the midst of a
+pushing back of chairs and a movement of feet, the response was
+quick and universal.  Hilda accepted their nods and becks and
+waving glasses with a slow movement of her beautiful eyes and a
+quiet smile, in the subsidence of sound Mr. Stanhope's voice was
+heard again, "We can hardly expect a speech from Miss Howe, but
+perhaps Mr. Hamilton Bradley, whose international reputation need
+hardly be referred to, will kindly say a few words on her behalf."
+
+Then with deliberate grace, Hilda rose from her chair, a tall
+figure among them, looking down with a hint of compassionateness on
+the little man at her left.  She stood for an instant without
+speaking, as if the flushed silence, the expectation, the warm
+magnetism that drew all their eyes to her were enough.  Then out of
+something like reverie she came to the matter, she threw up her
+beautiful face with one of the supreme gestures which belonged to
+her.  "I think," she said, with a little smiling bow in his
+direction, "that I will not trouble my friend Mr. Bradley.  He has
+rendered me so many kind services already that I am sure I might
+count upon him again, but this is a thing I should like to do for
+myself.  I would not have my thanks chilled by even the passage
+from my heart to his."  There was something like bravado in the
+glance that rested lightly on Bradley with this.  One would have
+said that parley of hearts between them was not a thing that as a
+rule she courted.  "I can only offer you my thanks, poor things to
+which we can give neither life nor substance, yet I beg that you
+will somehow take them and remember them.  It is to me, and will
+always be, a kind of crowning satisfaction that you were pleased to
+come together to-night to tell me I had done well.  You know
+yourselves, and I know, how much too flattering your kindness is,
+but perhaps it will hurt nobody if to-night I take it as it is
+generously offered, and let it make me as happy as you intend me to
+be.  At all events, no one could disturb me in believing that in
+obtaining your praise and your good wishes I have done well
+enough."
+
+For a few seconds she stopped speaking, but she held them with her
+eyes from the mistake of supposing she had done.  Lindsay, who was
+watching her closely and hanging with keen pleasure on the
+sweetness and precision of what she found to say, noted a swift
+constriction pass upon her face.  There was a half-tone of
+difference, too, in her voice, when she raised it again, a firmer
+vibration, as if she passed, deliberate and aware, out of one phase
+into another.
+
+"No," she went on, "I am not shy on this occasion; indeed, I feel
+that I should like to keep your eyes upon me for a long time to-
+night, and go on talking far past your patience or my wit.  For I
+cannot think it likely that our ways will cross again."  Here her
+words grew suddenly low and hurried.  "If I may trespass upon your
+interest so much further, I have to tell you that my connection
+with the stage closes with this evening's performance.  To-morrow I
+join the Anglican Order of the Sisters of St. Paul--the Baker
+Institution--in Calcutta, as a novice.  They have taken me without
+much question because--because the plague hospitals of this
+cheerful country"--she contrived a smile--"have made a great demand
+upon their body.  That is all.  I have nothing more to say."
+
+It was, after all, ineffective, the denouement, or perhaps it was
+too effective.  In any case it was received in silence, the
+applause that was ready falling back on itself, inconsistent and
+absurd.  The incredulity of Llewellyn Stanhope might have been
+electric had it found words, but that gentleman's protests were
+made in violent whispers, to which Hilda, who sat playing with a
+faded rose, seemed to pay no attention whatever.  One might have
+thought her more overcome than anyone.  She seemed to make one or
+two unsuccessful efforts to raise her head.  There was a moment of
+waiting for someone to reply; eyes were turned towards Mr. Bradley,
+and when it became plain that no one would, broken murmurs of talk
+began with a note of deprecation and many shakes of the head.  The
+women, especially, looked tragically at their neighbours with very
+wide-open eyes.  Presently a chair was drawn back, and then
+another, and people began to filter, in slow embarrassment, towards
+the door.  Lindsay came with Hilda's cloak.  "You won't mind my
+coming with you," he said, "I should like to hear the details."
+Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her, pouring out abusive
+disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture almost of
+irritation.  Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two, and
+went away with lingering backward looks.  In a quarter of an hour,
+Mr. Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicles into the
+lamp-lit ways of Calcutta, and only the native table-servants
+remained in somewhat resentful possession of what was left.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+If Duff Lindsay had apprehended that the reception of Miss Filbert
+by the Simpsons would involve any strain upon the affection his
+friends bore him, the event must have relieved him in no small
+degree.  He was soon made aware of its happy character, and
+constantly kept assured; indeed, it seemed that whenever Mrs.
+Simpson had nothing else to do she laid her pen to the task of
+telling him once again how cherished a satisfaction they found in
+Laura, and how reluctant they would be to lose it.  She wrote in
+that strain of facile sympathy which seems part of an Englishwoman's
+education, and often begged him to believe that the more she knew
+of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly she
+realised how dreary for him must have been the pang of parting and
+how arid the months of separation.  Mrs. Simpson herself was well
+acquainted with these trials of the spirit.  She and her husband
+had been divided by those wretched thousands of miles of ocean for
+three years one week and five days all told during their married
+life: she knew what it meant.  But if Duff could only see how well
+and blooming his beloved one was--she had gained twelve pounds
+already--Mrs. Simpson was sure the time of waiting would pass less
+heavily.  For herself, it was cruel but she smiled upon the
+deferred reunion of hearts, she would keep Laura till the very last
+day, and hoped to establish a permanent claim on her.  She was just
+the daughter Mrs. Simpson would have liked, so unspotted, so pure,
+so wrapped in high ideals; and then the page would reflect
+something of the adoring awe in which Mrs. Simpson would have held
+such a daughter.  It will be seen that Mrs. Simpson knew how to
+express herself, but there was a fine sincerity behind the mask of
+words; Miss Filbert had entered very completely into possession.
+
+It had its abnormal side, the way she entered into possession.
+Everything about Laura Filbert had its abnormal side, none the less
+obvious because it was inward, and invisible.  Nature, of course,
+worked with her, one might say that nature really did it all, since
+in the end she was practically unconscious, except for the hope
+that certain souls had been saved, that anything of the sort had
+happened.  She conquered the Simpsons and their friends chiefly by
+the simple impossibility that they should conquer her, walking
+immobile among them even while she admired Mr. Simpson's
+cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs. Simpson's house
+linen.  It must be confessed that nothing in her surroundings spoke
+to her more loudly or more subtly than these things.  In view of
+what happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation that the
+Simpsons and their circle would have a radical personal effect upon
+Laura Filbert became ludicrous.  They had no effect at all.  She
+took no tint, no curve.  She appeared not to see that these
+precious things were to be had for the assimilation.  Her grace
+remained exclusively that of holiness, and continued to fail to
+have any relation to the common little things she did and said.
+
+The Simpsons were more plastic.  Laura had been with them hardly a
+week before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to
+remodel her spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the
+word is admissible, presented.  The dear lady had never before
+realised, by her own statement, how terribly her religious feelings
+were mingled with domestic and social considerations, how firmly
+her spiritual edifice was based upon the things of this world.  She
+felt that her soul was honeycombed--that was her word--with
+conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like
+these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight.
+They were very soothing, these confessions.  Laura would take Mrs.
+Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge
+herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's
+case.  She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt
+for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace, she made short work of special
+services and ladies' Bible classes.  The world was white with
+harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was a recreation society
+for shop girls.  But it was something, it was everything, to be
+uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift themselves in
+prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching supplication in
+which to represent the matter that the burden of her friend and
+hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.  Mrs.
+Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as
+since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the
+gentle paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss
+Filbert's presence.
+
+Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his
+choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings
+and goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little
+sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday
+evening, for instance, and accompany her to the firemen's halls and
+skating rinks lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner
+from which their guest seemed to derive benefit.  With all this,
+the Simpsons were sometimes troubled by the impression that they
+could not claim to be making their angel in the house completely
+happy.  The air, the garden, the victoria, the turbot and the
+whitebait, these were all that has been vaunted, and even to the
+modesty of the Simpsons it was evident that the intimacy they
+offered their guest should count for something.  There were other
+friends too, young friends who tried to teach her to play tennis,
+robust and silent young persons who threw shy flushed glances at
+her in the pauses of the games, and wished supremely, without
+daring to hint it, that she would let fall some word about her
+wonderful romance--a hope ever renewed, ever to be disappointed.
+And physically Laura expanded before their eyes.  The colour that
+came into her cheek gave her the look of a person painted by
+Bouguereau; that artist would have found in her a model whom he
+could have represented with sincerity.  Yet something was missing
+to her, her friends were dimly aware.  Her desirable surroundings
+kindled her to but a perfunctory interest in life--the electric
+spark was absent.  Mrs. Simpson relied strategically upon the
+wedding preparations and hurried them on, announcing in May that it
+was quite time to think about various garments of which the fashion
+is permanent, but the issue was blank.  No ripple stirred the
+placid waters, unless indeed we take that way of describing Laura's
+calm demand, when the decision lay between Valenciennes and Torchon
+lace for under-bodies, to hear whether Mrs. Simpson had ever known
+Duff Lindsay to be anxious about his eternal future.  The girl
+continued to give forth a mere pale reflection of her circumstances,
+and Mrs. Simpson was forced into the deprecation that perhaps one
+would hardly call her a joyous Christian.
+
+But for the Zenana Light Society this impression of Miss Filbert
+might have deepened.  The committee of that body was almost
+entirely composed of Mrs. Simpson's friends, and naturally came to
+learn much about her guest.  The matter was vastly considered, but
+finally Miss Filbert was asked to speak at one of the monthly
+meetings the ladies held among themselves to keep the society "in
+touch" with the cause.  Laura brought them, as one would imagine,
+surprisingly in touch.  She made pictures for them, letting her own
+eyelashes close deliberately while they stared.  She moved these
+ladies, inspired them, carried them away, and the fact that none of
+them found themselves able afterward to quote the most pathetic
+passages seemed rather to add to the enthusiasm with which they
+described the address.  The first result was a shower of
+invitations to tea, occasions when Laura was easily led into
+monologue.  Miss Filbert became a cult of evangelistic drawing-
+rooms, and the same kind of forbearance was extended to her little
+traces of earlier social experiences as is offered, in salons of
+another sort, to the eccentricities of persons of genius.  Very
+soon other applications had to be met and considered, and Mrs.
+Simpson freely admitted that Laura would not be justified in
+refusing to the Methodists and Baptists what she had given
+elsewhere.  She reasserted her platform influence over audiences
+that grew constantly larger, and her world began to revolve again
+in that great relation to the infinities which it was her life to
+perceive and point out.  Mrs. Simpson charged her genially with
+having been miserable in Plymouth until she was allowed to do good
+in her own way, and saw that she had beef-tea after every occasion
+of doing it.  She became in a way a public character, and a lady
+journalist sent an account of her, with a photograph, to a well-
+known London fashion paper.  Perhaps the strongest effect she made
+was as the voice of the Purity Association, when she delivered an
+address, in the picturesque costume she had abandoned, attacking
+measures contemplated by Government for the protection of the
+health of the Army in India.  This was reported in full in the
+local paper, and Mr. Simpson sent a copy to Duff Lindsay, who
+received it, I regret to say, with an unmistakable imprecation.
+But Laura rejoiced.  Deprived of her tambourine she nevertheless
+rejoiced exceedingly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The Mother Superior had a long upper lip, which she was in the
+habit of drawing still further down; it gave her an air of great
+diplomatic caution, almost of casuistry.  Her face was pale and
+narrow; she had eyes that desired to be very penetrating, and a
+flat little stooping figure within her voluminous draperies.  She
+carried about with her all the virtues of a monastic order,
+patience was written upon her, and repression, discipline, and the
+love of administration, written and underlined, so that the
+Anglican Sister whom no Pope blessed was more priestly in her
+personal effect than any Jesuit.  It was difficult to remember that
+she had begun as a woman; she was now a somewhat anaemic formula
+making for righteousness.  Sister Ann Frances, who in her turn
+suggested the fat capons of an age of friars more indulgent to the
+flesh, and whose speech was of the crispest in this world where
+there was so much to do, thought poorly of the executive ability of
+the Mother Superior, and resented the imposition, as it were, of
+the long upper lip.  Out of this arose the only irritations that
+vexed the energetic flow of duty at the Baker Institution, slight
+official raspings which the Mother Superior immediately laid before
+Heaven at great length.  She did it with publicity, too, kneeling
+on the chunam floor of the chapel for an hour at a time obviously
+explaining matters.  The bureaucracy of the country was reflected
+in the Baker Institution; it seemed to Sister Ann Frances that her
+superior officer took undue advantage of her privilege of direct
+communication with the Supreme Authority, giving any colour she
+liked to the incident.  And when the Mother Superior's lumbago came
+on in direct consequence of the cold chunam, the annoyance of
+Sister Ann Frances was naturally not lessened.
+
+There were twenty or thirty of them, with their little white caps
+tied close under their chins, their long veils and their girdled
+black robes.  They were the most self-sacrificing women in Asia,
+the most devout, the most useful.  Government gave hospitals and
+doctors into their hands; they took the whole charge of certain
+schools.  They differed in complexion, some of the newly arrived
+being delightfully fresh and pink under their starched bandeaux;
+but they were all official, they all walked discreetly and directly
+about their business, with a jangle of keys in the folds of their
+robes, immensely organised, immensely under orders.  Hilda, when
+she had time, had the keenest satisfaction in contemplating them.
+She took the edge off the fact that she was not quite one, in aim
+and method, with these dear women as they supposed her to be, with
+the reflection that after all it might be worth while to work out a
+solution of life in those terms, standing aside from the world--the
+world was troublesome--and keeping an unfaltering eye upon the pity
+of things, an unfaltering hand at its assuagement.  It was simple
+and fine and indisputable, this work of throwing the clear shadow
+of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world; it carried the
+boon of finality in itself.  One might be stopped and put away at
+any moment, and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and
+it absolutely barred out such considerations as were presented by
+Hamilton Bradley.  There was a time early in her probation when she
+thought seriously that if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be
+this.
+
+She begged to be put on hospital work, and was sent for her
+indiscretion to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of
+British Troops.  The first duty of a novice was to be free of
+preference, to obey without a sigh of choice.  On the third day,
+however, Sister Ann Frances, supervising, stopped at the open
+schoolroom door to hear the junior female orphans repeating in
+happy chorus after their instructress the statement that seven
+times nine were fifty-six.  I think Hilda saw Sister Ann Frances in
+the door.  That couldn't go on, even in the name of discipline, and
+Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the Chief Nursing Sister at
+the General Hospital next day.  Sister Ann Frances was inclined to
+defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary arithmetic.
+
+"We all have our gifts," she said.  "Miss Howe's is not the
+multiplication table; but neither is mine stage-acting."  At which,
+the upper lip lengthened further into an upward curving smile, and
+the Mother Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe
+would develop one for making bandages, otherwise--  And there for
+the time being the matter rested.
+
+The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
+Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the
+ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
+acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the
+two women.  The full understanding of it was an abyss between them,
+across which they joined hands, looking elsewhere.  Even in the
+surprise of Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance
+away, lest her eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the
+situation.  It had never been discussed, but it had to be accepted,
+and occasionally referred to; and the terms of acceptance and
+reference made no implication of Stephen Arnold.  In her inmost
+privacy Alicia gazed breathless at the conception as a whole; she
+leaped at it, and caught it and held it to look, with a feverish
+comparison of possibilities.  It was not strange, perhaps, that she
+took a vivid personal interest in the essentials that enabled one
+to execute a flank movement like Hilda's, not that she should
+conceive the first of them to be that one must come out of a cab.
+She dismissed that impression with indignation as ungenerously
+cynical, but it always came back for redismissal.  It did not
+interfere in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to
+Stephen to come to Ten, Middleton Street, on afternoons or evenings
+when Hilda was there.  She was like one standing denied in the
+Street of Abundance; she had an avidity of the eye for even love's
+reflection.
+
+That was a little later.  At first there was the transformation to
+lament, the loss, the break.
+
+"You look," cried Miss Livingstone, the first time Hilda arrived in
+the dress of the novice, a kind of under-study of the Sisters'
+black and white, "you look like a person in a book, full of salient
+points, and yet made so simple to the reader.  If you go on wearing
+those things I shall end by understanding you perfectly."
+
+"If you don't understand me," Hilda said, dropping into the corner
+of a sofa, "Cela que je m'en doute, it's because you look for too
+much elaboration.  I am a simple creature, done with rather a broad
+brush--voila tout!"
+
+Nevertheless, Miss Livingstone's was a happy impression.  The
+neutrality of her hospital dress left Hilda in a manner exposed:
+one saw in a special way the significance of lines and curves; it
+was an astonishingly vigorous human expression.
+
+Alicia leaned forward, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin
+tucked into her palm, and looked at it.  The elbow bent itself in
+light blue muslin of extreme elegance, trimmed with lace.  The
+colour found a wistful echo in the eyes that regarded Miss Howe,
+who was accustomed to the look, and met it with impenetrable
+commonplace, being made impatient by nothing in this world so much
+as by futility, however charming.
+
+"Just now," Alicia said, "the shadows under your eyes are brushed
+too deep."
+
+"I don't believe I sleep well in a dormitory."
+
+"Horrible!  All the little comforts of life--don't you miss them?"
+
+"I never had them, my dear--I never had them.  Life has never given
+me very many luxuries--I don't miss them.  An occasional hour to
+one's self--and that we get even at the Institution.  The
+conventions are strictly conserved, believe me."
+
+"One imagines that kind of place is always clean."
+
+"When I have time I think of Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and
+believe myself in Paradise.  The repose is there, the angels also--
+dear commanding things--and a perpetual incense of cheap soap.  And
+there is some good in sleeping in a row.  It reminds one that after
+all one is very like other women."
+
+"It wouldn't convince me if I were you.  And how did the sisters
+receive you--with the harp and the psaltery?"
+
+"That was rather," said Hilda gravely, "what I expected.  On the
+contrary.  They snubbed me--they really did.  There were two of
+them.  I said, 'Reverend ladies, please be a little kind.  Convents
+are strange to me; I shall probably commit horrible sins without
+knowing it.  Give me your absolution in advance--at least your
+blessing.'"
+
+"Hilda, you didn't!"
+
+"It is delightful to observe the Mother Abbess, or whatever she is,
+disguising the fact that she takes any interest in me.  Such
+diplomacy--funny old thing."
+
+"They must be devoured with curiosity!"
+
+"Well, they ask no questions.  One sees an everlasting finger on
+the lip.  It's a little boring.  One feels inclined to speak up and
+say, 'Mesdames, entendez--it isn't so bad as you think.'  But then
+their fingers would go into their ears."
+
+"And the rules, Hilda?  I can't imagine you, somehow, under rules."
+
+"I am attached to the rules; I think about them all day long.  They
+make the thing simple and--possible.  It is a little like living
+for the first time in a house all right angles after--after a
+lifelong voyage in a small boat."
+
+"Isn't the house rather empty?"
+
+"Oh, well!"
+
+Alicia put out her hand and tucked an irrelevant bit of lace into
+Hilda's bosom.  "I can tell you who is interested," she cried.
+"The Archdeacon--the Archdeacon and Mrs. Barberry.  They both dined
+here last night; and you lasted from the fish to the pudding.  I
+got so bored with you, my dear, in your new capacity."
+
+A new ray of happiness came into the smile of the novice.  "What
+did they say?  Do tell me what they said."
+
+"There was a difference of opinion.  The Archdeacon held that with
+God all things were possible.  He used an expression more suitable
+to a dinner-party; but I think that is what he meant.  Mrs.
+Barberry thought it wouldn't last.  Mrs. Barberry was very cynical.
+She said anyone could see that you were as emotional as ever you
+could be."
+
+The eyes of the two women met, and they laughed frankly.  A sense
+of expansion came between them, in which for an instant they were
+silent.
+
+"Tell me about the hospital," Alicia said presently.  "Ah, the
+hospital!"  Hilda's face changed; there came into her eyes the
+moved look that always waked a thrill in Alicia Livingstone, as if
+she were suddenly aware that she had stepped upon ground where feet
+like hers passed seldom.
+
+"There is nothing to tell you that is not--sad.  Such odds and
+ends, of life, thrown together!"
+
+"Have you had any experiences yet?"
+
+Hilda stared for a moment absently in front of her, and then turned
+her head aside to answer as if she closed her eyes on something.
+
+"Experiences?  Delightful Alicia, speaking your language, no.  You
+are thinking of the resident surgeon, the medical student, the
+interesting patient.  My resident surgeon is fifty years old; the
+medical student is a Bengali in white cotton and patent leather
+shoes.  I am occupied in a ward full of deck hands.  For these I
+hold the bandage and the bottle; they are hardly aware of me."
+
+"You are sure to have them," Alicia said.  "They crop up wherever
+you go in this world, either before you or behind you."
+
+Hilda fixed her eyes attentively upon her companion.  "Sometimes,"
+she said, "you say things that are extremely true in their general
+bearing.  A fortuneteller with cards gives one the same shock of
+surprise.  Well, let me tell you, I have been promoted to
+temperatures.  I took thirty-five to-day.  Next week I am to make
+poultices; the week after, baths and fomentations."
+
+"What are the others like--the other novices?"
+
+"Nearly all Eurasians, one native, a Hindu widow--the Sisters are
+almost demonstrative to her--and one or two local European girls:
+the commissariat sergeant class, I should think."
+
+"They don't sound attractive, and I am glad.  You will depend the
+more upon me."
+
+Hilda looked thoughtfully at Miss Livingstone.  "I will depend,"
+she said, "a good deal upon you."
+
+It was Alicia's fate to meet the Archdeacon again that evening at
+dinner.  "And is she really throwing her heart into the work?"
+asked that dignitary, referring to Miss Howe.
+
+"Oh, I think so," Alicia said.  "Yes."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The labours of the Baker Institution and of the Clarke Mission were
+very different in scope, so much so that if they had been secular
+bodies working for profit, there would have been hardly a point of
+contact between them.  As it was they made one, drawing together in
+affiliation for the comfort of mutual support in a heathen country
+where all the other Englishmen wrote reports, drilled troops, or
+played polo, with all the other Englishwomen in the corresponding
+female parts.  Doubtless the little communities prayed for each
+other.  One may imagine, not profanely, their petitions rising on
+either side of the heedless, multitudinous, idolatrous city, and
+meeting at some point in the purer air above the yellow dust-haze.
+I am not aware that they held any other mutual duty or privilege,
+but this bond was known, and enabled people whose conscience
+pricked them in that direction to give little garden teas to which
+they invited Clarke Brothers and Baker Sisters, secure in doing a
+benevolent thing and at the same time embarrassing nobody except,
+possibly, the Archdeacon, who was officially exposed to being asked
+as well and had no right to complain.  The affiliation was thus a
+social convenience, since it is unlikely that without it anybody
+would have hit upon so ingenious a way of killing, as it were, a
+Baker Sister and a Clarke Brother with one stone.  It is not
+surprising that this degree of intelligence should fail to see the
+profound official difference between Baker Sisters and Baker
+novices.  As the Mother Superior said, it did not seem to occur to
+people that there could be in connection with a religious body,
+such words as discipline and subordination, which were certainly
+made ridiculous for the time being, when she and Sister Ann Frances
+were asked to eat ices on the same terms as Miss Hilda Howe.  It
+must have been more than ever painful to these ladies, regarded
+from the official point of view, when it became plain, as it
+usually did, that the interest of the afternoon centred in Miss
+Howe, whether or not the Archdeacon happened to be present.  Their
+displeasure was so clear, after the first occasion, that Hilda felt
+obliged when the next one came, to fall back on her original
+talent, and ate her ice abashed and silent speaking only when she
+was spoken to, and then in short words and long hesitations.
+Thereupon the Sisters were of opinion that after all poor Miss Howe
+could not help her unenviable lot, she was perhaps more to be
+pitied on account of it than--anything else.  It came to this, that
+Sister Ann Frances even had an exhibitor's pride in her, and Hilda
+knew the sensations of a barbarian female captive in the bonds of
+the Christians.  But she could not afford to risk being cut off
+from those little garden teas.  All told, they were few; ladies
+disturbed by ideas of social duties toward missionaries being so
+uncommon.
+
+She told Stephen so, frankly, one afternoon when he charged her
+with being so unlike herself, and he heard her explanation with a
+gravity which contained an element of satisfaction.  "It is, of
+course, a pleasure to us to meet," he said, "a pleasure to us
+both."  That was part of the satisfaction, that he could meet her
+candour with the same openness.  He was not even afraid to mention
+to her the stimulus she gave him always and his difficulty in
+defining it, and once he told her how, after a talk with her, he
+had lain awake until the small hours unable to stop his excited
+rush of thought.  He added that he was now personally and selfishly
+glad she had chosen as she did three months before; it made a
+difference to him, her being in Calcutta, a sensible and material
+difference.  He had better hope and heart in his work.  It was the
+last luxury he would ever have dreamed of allowing himself, a woman
+friend; but since life had brought it in the oddest way the boon
+should be met with no grudging of gratitude.  A kind of sedate
+cheerfulness crept into his manner which was new to him; he went
+about his duties with the look of a man to whom life had dictated
+its terms and who found them acceptable.  His blood might have
+received some mysterious chemical complement, so much was his eye
+clearer, his voice firmer, and the things he found to say more
+decisive.  Nor did any consideration of their relations disturb
+him.  He never thought of the oxygen in the air he breathed, and he
+seldom thought of Hilda.
+
+They were walking toward the Institution together the day he
+explained to her his gratification that she had elected to remain.
+Sister Ann Frances and Sister Margaret led; Arnold and Hilda came
+behind.  He had an errand to the Mother Superior--he would go all
+the way.  It was late in May and late in the afternoon; all the
+treetops on the Maidan were bent under the sweep of the south wind,
+blowing a caressing coolness from the sea.  It spread fragrances
+about and shook down blossoms from the gold-mohur trees.  One could
+see nothing anywhere, so red and yellow as they were, except the
+long coat of a Government messenger, a point of scarlet moving in
+the perspective of a dusty road.  The spreading acres of turf were
+baked to every earth-colour; wherever a pine dropped needles and an
+old woman swept them up, a trail of dust ran curling along the
+ground like smoke.  The little party was unusual in walking;
+glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias
+and landaus that rolled past.  Even the convalescent British
+soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped
+bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-
+skirts so near the powder of the road.  The Sisters in front walked
+with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to
+be consulting.  Hilda reflected, looking at them, that they always
+seemed to be consulting; it was the normal attitude of that long
+black veil that flowed behind.
+
+Arnold walked beside his companion, his hands loosely clasped
+behind him, with the air of semi-detachment that young clergymen
+sometimes have with their wives.  Whether it was that, or the trace
+of custom his satisfaction carried, the casual glance might easily
+have taken them for a married pair.
+
+"There is a kind of folly and stupidity in saying it," he said,
+"but you have done--you do--a great deal for me."
+
+She turned toward him with a wistful, measuring look.  It searched
+his face for an instant and came back baffled.  Arnold spoke with
+so much kindness, so much appreciation.
+
+"Very little," she said mechanically, looking at the fresh
+footprints of Sister Ann Frances and Sister Margaret.
+
+"But I know.  And can't you tell me--it would make me so very
+happy--that I have done something for you too--something that you
+value?"
+
+Hilda's eyes lightened curiously, reverie came into them, and a
+smile.  She answered as if she spoke to herself, "I should not know
+how to tell you."
+
+Then scenting wonder in him she added, "You were thinking of
+something--in particular?"
+
+"You have sometimes made me believe," Stephen returned, "that I may
+account myself, under God, the accident which induced you to take
+up your blessed work.  I was thinking of that."
+
+"Oh," she said, "of that!" and seemed to take refuge in silence.
+
+"Yes," Arnold said, with infinite gentleness.
+
+"But you were profoundly the cause!  I might say you are, for
+without you I doubt whether I should have the--courage--"
+
+"Oh no!  Oh no!  He who inspired you in the beginning will sustain
+you to the end.  Think that.  Believe that."
+
+"Will He?"  Her voice was neutral, as if it would not betray too
+much, but there was a listlessness that spoke louder in the bend of
+her head, the droop of her shoulder.
+
+"For you perhaps," Arnold said thoughtfully, "there is only one
+assurance of it--the satisfaction your vocation brings you now.
+That will broaden and increase," he went on, almost with buoyancy,
+"growing more and more your supreme good as the years go on."
+
+"How much you give me credit for!"
+
+"Not nearly enough--not nearly.  Who is there like you?" he
+demanded simply.
+
+His words seemed a baptism.  She lifted up her face after them, and
+the trace of them was on her eyes and lips.  "I have passed two
+examinations, at all events," she informed him, with sudden gaiety,
+"and Sister Ann Frances says that in two or three months I shall
+probably get through the others.  Sister Ann Frances thinks me more
+intelligent than might be expected.  And if I do pass those
+examinations I shall be what they call a quick-time probationer.  I
+shall have got it over in six months.  Do you think," she asked, as
+if to please herself; "that six months will be long enough?"
+
+"It depends.  There is so much to consider."
+
+"Yes--it depends.  Sometimes I think it will be, but oftener I
+think it will take longer."
+
+"I should be inclined to leave it entirely with the Sisters."
+
+"I am so undisciplined," murmured Hilda, "I fear I shall cling to
+my own opinion.  Now we must overtake the others and you must walk
+the rest of the way with Sister Ann--no, Sister Margaret, she is
+senior."
+
+"I don't at all see the necessity," Stephen protested.  He was
+wilful and wayward; he adopted a privileged air, and she scolded
+him.  In their dispute they laughed so imprudently that Sister Ann
+Frances turned her draped head to look back at them.  Then they
+quickened their steps and joined the elder ladies, and Stephen
+walked with Sister Margaret to the door of the Institution.  She
+mentioned to the Mother Superior afterwards that young Mr. Arnold
+was really a delightful conversationalist.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+They talked a great deal in Plymouth about the way the time was
+passing in Calcutta during those last three months before Laura
+should return, the months of the rains.  "Now," said Mrs. Simpson,
+early in July, "it will be pouring every day, with great patches of
+the Maidan under water, and rivers, my dear, RIVERS, in the back
+streets"; and Laura had a reminiscence about how, exactly at that
+time, a green mould used to spread itself fresh every morning on
+the matting under her bed in Bentinck Street.  Later on they would
+agree that perhaps by this time there was a "break in the rains,"
+and that nothing in the world was so trying as a break in the
+rains, the sun grilling down and drawing up steam from every
+puddle.  In September, things, they remembered, would be at their
+very worst and most depressing; one had hardly the energy to lift a
+finger in September.  Mrs. Simpson looked back upon the discomfort
+she had endured in Bengal at this time of year with a kind of
+regret that it was irretrievably over; she lingered upon a severe
+illness which had been part of the experience.  She seemed to think
+that with a little judicious management she might have spent more
+time in that climate, and less in England.  There was in her tone a
+suggestion of gentle envy of Laura, going forth to these dismal
+conditions with her young life in her hands all tricked out for the
+sacrifice, which left Duff Lindsay and his white and gold drawing-
+room entirely out of consideration.  Any sacrifice to Mrs. Simpson
+was alluring, she would be killed all day long, in a manner, for
+its own sake.
+
+The victim had taken her passage early in October, and during the
+first week of that month Plymouth gathered itself into meetings to
+bid her farewell.  A curiously sacred character had fastened itself
+upon her; it was not in the least realised that she was going out
+to be married to an altogether secular young broker moving in
+fashionable circles in one of the gayest cities in the world.  Ones
+or two reverend persons in the course of commending their young
+sister to the protection of the Almighty in her approaching
+separation from the dear friends who surrounded her in Plymouth,
+made references implying that her labours would continue to the
+glory of God, taking it as a matter of course.  Miss Filbert was by
+this time very much impregnated with the idea that they would, she
+did not know precisely how, but that would open itself out.  Duff
+had long been assimilated as part of the programme.  All that money
+and humility could contribute should be forthcoming from him; she
+had a familiar dream of him as her standard-bearer, undistinguished
+but for ever safe.
+
+Yet it was with qualified approval that Mrs. Simpson, amid the
+confusion of the Coromandel's preparations for departure at London
+Docks, heard the inevitable strains of the Salvation Army rising
+aft.  Laura immediately cried, "I shall have friends among the
+passengers," and Mrs. Simpson so far forgot herself as to say,
+"Yes, if they are nice."  The ladies were sitting on deck beside
+the pile of Laura's very superior cabin luggage.  Mrs. Simpson
+glanced at it as if it offered a kind of corroboration of the
+necessity of their being nice.  "There are always a few delightful
+Christian people, if one takes the trouble to find them out, at
+this end of the ship," she said defensively.  "I have never failed
+to find it so."
+
+"I don't think much of Christians who are so hard to discover,"
+Laura said with decision; and Mrs. Simpson, rebuked, thought of the
+mischievous nature of class prejudices.  Laura herself--had she not
+been drawn from what one might call distinctly the other end of the
+ship?--and who, among those who vaunted themselves ladies and
+gentlemen, could compare with Laura!  The idea that she had shown a
+want of sympathy with those dear people who were so strenuously
+calling down a blessing on the Coromandel somewhere behind the
+smoke stacks, embittered poor Mrs. Simpson's remaining tears of
+farewell, and when the bell rang the signal for the last good-bye,
+she embraced her young friend with the fervent request, "Do make
+friends with them, dear one--make friends with them at once"; and
+Laura said, "If they will make friends with me."
+
+By the time the ship had well got her nose down the coast of Spain,
+Miss Filbert had created her atmosphere, and moved about in it from
+end to end of the quarter-deck.  It was a recognisable thing, her
+atmosphere, one never knew when it would discharge a question
+relating to the gravest matters; and persons unprepared to give
+satisfaction upon this point--one fears there are some on a ship
+bound east of Suez--found it blighting.  They moved their long
+chairs out of the way, they turned pointedly indifferent backs, the
+lady who shared Miss Filbert's cabin--she belonged to a smart
+cavalry regiment at Mhow--went about saying things with a distinct
+edge.  Miss Filbert exhausted all the means.  She attempted to hold
+a meeting forward of the smoking cabin, standing for elevation on
+one of the ship's quoit buckets to preach, but with this the
+captain was reluctantly compelled to interfere on behalf of the
+whist-players inside.  In the evening, after dinner, she established
+herself in a sheltered corner and sang.  Her recovered voice lifted
+itself with infinite pathetic sweetness in songs about the poverty
+of the world and the riches of heaven; the notes mingled with the
+churning of the screw, and fell in the darkness beyond the ship's
+lights abroad upon the sea.  The other passengers listened aloof;
+the Coromandel was crowded, but you could have drawn a wide circle
+round her chair.  On the morning of the fourth day out--she had not
+felt quite well enough for adventures before--she found her way to
+the second-class saloon, being no doubt fully justified of her
+conscience in abandoning the first to the flippancies of its
+preference.
+
+In the second-class end the tone was certainly more like that of
+Plymouth.  Laura had a grateful sense of this in coming, almost at
+once, upon a little group gathered together for praise and prayer,
+of which four or five persons of both sexes, labelled "S. A.,"
+naturally formed the centre.  They were not only praying and
+praising without discouragement, they had attracted several other
+people who had brought their chairs into near and friendly
+relation, and even joined sometimes in the chorus of the hymns.
+There was a woman in mourning who cried a good deal--her tears
+seemed to refresh the Salvationists and inspire them to louder and
+more cheerful efforts.  There was a man in a wide, soft felt hat
+with the malaria of the Terai in the hollows under his eyes; there
+was a Church Missionary with an air of charity and forbearance, and
+the bushy-eyed colonel of a native regiment looking vigilant
+against ridicule, with his wife, whose round red little face
+continually waxed and waned in a smile of true contentment.  It was
+not till later that Laura came to know them all so very well, but
+her eye rested on them one after another, with approval, as she
+drew near.  Without pausing in his chant--it happened to be one of
+triumph--without even looking at her, the leader indicated an empty
+chair.  It was his own chair.  "Colonel Markin, S. A." was printed
+in black letters on its striped canvas back; Laura noticed that.
+
+After it was over, the little gathering, Colonel Markin specially
+distinguished her.  He did it delicately.  "I hope you won't mind
+my expressin' my thanks for the help you gave us in the singin',"
+he said.  "Such a voice I've seldom had the pleasure to join with.
+May I ask where you got it trained?"
+
+He was a narrow-chested man with longish sandy hair and thin
+features.  His eyes were large, blue, and protruding, his forehead
+very high and white.  There was a pinkness about the root of his
+nose, and a scanty yellow moustache upon his upper lip, while his
+chin was partly hidden by a beard equally scanty and even more
+yellow.  He had extremely long white hands; one could not help
+observing them as they clasped his book of devotion.
+
+Laura looked at him with profound appreciation of these details.
+She knew Colonel Markin by reputation, he had done a great work
+among the Cingalese.  "It was trained," she said, casting down her
+eyes, "on the battlefields of our Army."
+
+Colonel Markin attempted to straighten his shoulders and to stiffen
+his chin.  He seemed vaguely aware of a military tradition which
+might make it necessary for him, as a very senior officer indeed,
+to say something.  But the impression was transitory.  Instead of
+using any rigour he held out his hand.  Laura took it reverently,
+and the bones shut up, like the sticks of a fan, in her grasp.
+"Welcome, comrade!" he said, and there was a pause, as there should
+be after such an apostrophe.
+
+"When you came among us this afternoon," Colonel Markin resumed, "I
+noticed you.  There was something about the way you put your hand
+over your eyes when I addressed our Heavenly Father that spoke to
+me.  It spoke to me and said, 'Here we have a soul that knows what
+salvation means--there's no doubt about that.'  Then when you
+raised a Hallelujah I said to myself, 'That's got the right ring to
+it.'  And so you're a sister in arms!"
+
+"I was," Laura murmured.
+
+"You was--you were.  Well, well--I want to hear all about it.  It
+is now," continued Colonel Markin, as two bells struck and a
+steward passed them with a bugle, "the hour for our dinner, and I
+suppose that you too," he bent his head respectfully towards the
+other half of the ship, "partake of some meal at this time.  But if
+you will seek us out again at the meeting between four and five I
+shall be at your service afterwards, and pleased," he took her hand
+again, "PLEASED to see you."
+
+Laura went back to the evening meeting, and after that missed none
+of these privileges.  In due course she was asked to address it,
+and then her position became enviable from all points of view, for
+people who did not draw up their chairs and admire her inspirations
+sat at a distance and admired her clothes.  Very soon, at her
+special request, she was allowed to resign her original place at
+table and take a revolving chair at the nine o'clock breakfast, one
+o'clock dinner, and six o'clock tea which sustained the second
+saloon.  Daily, ascending the companion ladder to the main deck aft
+she gradually faded from cognisance forward.  There they lay back
+in their long chairs and sipped their long drinks, and with neutral
+eyes and lips they let the blessing go.
+
+In the intervals between the exercises Miss Filbert came and went
+in the cabin of three young Salvationists of her own sex.  They
+could always make room for her, difficult as it may appear; she
+held for them an indefinite store of fascination.  Laura would
+extend herself on a top berth beside the round-eyed Norwegian to
+whom it belonged, with the cropped head of the owner pillowed on
+her sisterly arm, and thus they passed hours, discussing
+conversions as medical students might discuss cases, relating,
+comparing.  They talked a great deal about Colonel Markin.  They
+said it was a beautiful life.  More beautiful if possible had been
+the life of Mrs. Markin, who was his second wife, and who had been
+"promoted to glory" six months before.  She had gained promotion
+through jungle fever, which had carried her off in three days.  The
+first Mrs. Markin had died of drink--that was what had sent the
+Colonel into the Army, she, the first Mrs. Markin, having willed
+her property away from him.  Colonel Markin had often rejoiced
+publicly that the lady had been of this disposition, the results to
+him had been so blessed.  Apparently he spoke without reserve of
+his domestic affairs in connection with his spiritual experiences,
+using both the Mrs. Markins when it was desirable as "illustrations."
+The five had reached this degree of intimacy by the time the
+Coromandel was nearing Port Said, and every day the hemispheres of
+sea and sky they watched through the porthole above the Norwegian
+girl's berth grew bluer.
+
+From the first Colonel Markin had urged Miss Filbert's immediate
+return to the Army.  He found her sympathetic to the idea, willing
+indeed to embrace it with open arms, but there were difficulties.
+Mr. Lindsay, as a difficulty, was almost insuperable to anything
+like a prompt step in that direction.  Colonel Markin admitted it
+himself.  He was bound to admit it he said, but nothing, since he
+joined the Army, had ever been so painful to him.  "I wish I could
+deny it," he said with frankness; "but there is no doubt that for
+the present your first duty is towards your gentleman, towards him
+who placed that ring upon your finger."  There was no sarcasm in
+his describing Lindsay as a gentleman; he used the term in a kind
+of extra special sense where a person less accustomed to polite
+usages might have spoken of Laura's young man.  "But remember, my
+child," he continued, "it is only your poor vile body that is yours
+to dispose of, your soul belongs to God Almighty, and no earthly
+husband, especially as you say he is still in his sins, is going to
+have the right to interfere."  This may seem vague, as the
+statement of a position, but Laura found it immensely fortifying.
+That and similar arguments built her up in her determination to
+take up what Colonel Markin called her life-work again at the
+earliest opportunity.  She had forfeited her rank, that she
+accepted humbly as a proper punishment, ardently hoping it would be
+found sufficient.  She would go back as a private, take her place
+in the ranks, and nothing in her married life should interfere with
+the things that cried out to be done in Bentinck Street.  Somehow
+she had less hope of securing Lindsay as a spiritual companion in
+arms since she had confided the affair to Colonel Markin.  As he
+said, they must hope for the best, but he could not help admitting
+that he took a gloomy view of Lindsay.
+
+"Once he has secured you," the Colonel said, with an appreciative
+glance at Laura's complexion, "what will he care about his soul?
+Nothing."
+
+Their enthusiasm had ample opportunity to strengthen, their mutual
+satisfactions to expand, in the close confines of life on board
+ship, and as if to seal and sanctify the voyage permanently a
+conversion took place in the second saloon, owning Laura's agency.
+It was the maid of the lady in the cavalry regiment, a hardened
+heart, as two stewards and a bandmaster on board could testify.
+When this occurred the time that was to elapse between Laura's
+marriage and her return to the ranks was shortened to one week.
+"And quite long enough," Colonel Markin said, "considering how much
+more we need you than your gentleman does, my dear sister."
+
+It was plain to them all that Colonel Markin had very special views
+about his dear sister.  The other dear sisters looked on with
+pleasurable interest, admitting the propriety of it, as Colonel
+Markin walked up and down the deck with Laura, examining her lovely
+nature, "drawing her out" on the subject of her faith and her
+assurance.  It was natural, as he told her, that in her peculiar
+situation she should have doubts and difficulties.  He urged her to
+lay bare her heart, and she laid it bare.  One evening--it was
+heavenly moonlight on the Indian Ocean, and they were two days past
+Aden on the long south-east run to Ceylon--she came and stood
+before him with a small packet in her hand.  She was all in white,
+and more like an angel than Markin expected ever to see anything in
+this world, though as to the next his anticipations may have been
+extravagant.
+
+"Now I wonder," said he, "where you are going to sit down?"
+
+A youngster in the Police got up and pushed his chair forward, but
+Laura shook her head.
+
+"I am going out there," she said, pointing to the farthermost stern
+where passengers were not encouraged to sit, "and I want to consult
+you."
+
+Markin got up.  "If there's anything pressin' on your mind," he
+said, "you can't do better."
+
+Laura said nothing until they were alone with the rushing of the
+screw, two Lascars, some coils of rope, and the hand-steering gear.
+Then she opened the packet.  "These," she said, "these are pressing
+on my mind."
+
+She held out a string of pearls, a necklace of pearls and
+turquoises, a heavy band bracelet studded, Delhi fashion, with
+gems, one or two lesser fantasies.
+
+"Jewellery!" said Markin.  "Real or imitation?"
+
+"So far as that goes they are good.  Mr. Lindsay gave them to me.
+But what have I to do with jewels, the very emblem of the folly of
+the world, the desire that itches in palms that know no good works,
+the price of sin!"  She leaned against the masthead as she spoke,
+the wind blew her hair and her skirt out toward the following seas.
+With that look in her eyes she seemed a creature who had alighted
+on the ship but who could not stay.
+
+Colonel Markin held the pearls up in the moonlight.
+
+"They must have cost something to buy," he said.
+
+Laura was silent.
+
+"And so they're a trouble to you.  Have you taken them to the Lord
+in prayer?"
+
+"Oh, many times."
+
+"Couldn't seem to hear any answer?"
+
+"The only answer I could hear was.  'So long as you have them I
+will not speak with you.'"
+
+"That seems pretty plain and clear.  And yet?" said the Colonel,
+fondling the turquoises, "nobody can say there's any harm in such
+things, especially if you don't wear them."
+
+"Colonel, they are my great temptation.  I don't know that I
+wouldn't wear them.  And when I wear them I can think of nothing
+sacred, nothing holy.  When they were given to me I used--I used to
+get up in the night to look at them."
+
+"Shall I lay it before the Almighty?  That bracelet's got a
+remarkably good clasp."
+
+"Oh no--no!  I must part with them.  To-night I can do it, to-
+night--"
+
+"There's nobody on this ship that will give you any price for
+them."
+
+"I would not think of selling them.  It would be sending them from
+my hands to do harm to some other poor creature, weaker than I!"
+
+"You can't return them to-night."
+
+"I wouldn't return them.  That would be the same as keeping them."
+
+"Then what--oh, I see!" exclaimed Markin.  "You want to give them
+to the Army.  Well, in my capacity, on behalf of General Booth--"
+
+"No," cried Laura with sudden excitement, "not that either.  I will
+give them to nobody.  But this is what I will do!"  She seized the
+bracelet and flung it far out into the opaline track of the vessel,
+and the smaller objects, before her companion could stop her,
+followed it.  Then he caught her wrist.
+
+"Stop!" he cried.  "You've gone off your head--you've got fever.
+You're acting wicked with that jewellery.  Stop and let us reason
+it out together."
+
+She already had the turquoises, and with a jerk of her left hand,
+she freed it and threw them after the rest.  The necklace caught
+the handrail as it fell, and Markin made a vain spring to save it.
+He turned and stared at Laura, who stood fighting the greatest
+puissance of feeling she had known, looking at the pearls.  As he
+stared she kissed them twice, and then, leaning over the ship's
+side, let them slowly slide out of her fingers and fall into the
+waves below.  The moonlight gave them a divine gleam as they fell.
+She turned to Markin with tears in her eyes.  "Now," she faltered,
+"I can be happy again.  But not to-night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+While the Coromandel was throbbing out her regulation number of
+knots towards Colombo, October was passing over Bengal.  It went
+with lethargy, the rains were too close on its heels; but at the
+end of the long hot days, when the resplendent sun struck down on
+the glossy trees and the over-lush Maidan, there often stole
+through Calcutta a breath of the coming respite of December.  The
+blue smoke of the people's cooking fires began to hang again in the
+streets, the pungent smell of it was pleasant in the still air.
+The south wind turned back at the Sunderbunds; instead of it, one
+met round corners a sudden crispness that stayed just long enough
+to be recognised and melted damply away.  A week might have two or
+three of such promises and foretastes.
+
+Hilda Howe, approaching the end of her probation at the Baker
+Institution, threw the dormitory window wide to them, went out to
+seek them.  They gave her a new stirring of vitality, something
+deep within her leaped up responding to the voucher the evenings
+brought that presently they would bring something new and different.
+She vibrated to an irrepressible pulse of accord with that; it made
+her hand strong and her brain clear for the unimportant matters
+that remained within the scope of the monotonous moment.  There had
+come upon her a stimulating assurance that it would be only a
+moment--now.  She did not consider this, she could hardly be said
+to be intelligently aware of it, but it underlay all that she said
+and did.  Her spirits gained an enviable lightness, she began again
+to see beautiful, touching things in the life that carried her on
+with it.  She explained to Stephen Arnold that she was immensely
+happy at having passed the last of her nursing examinations.
+
+"I hardly dare ask you," he said, "what you are going to do now."
+
+He looked furtive and anxious; she saw that he did, and the
+perception irritated her.  She had to tell herself that she had
+given him the right to look in any way he pleased--indeed yes.
+
+"I hardly dare ask myself," she answered, and was immediately
+conscious that for the first time in the history of their relations
+she had spoken to him that which was expedient.
+
+"I hope the Sisters are not trying to influence you," he said
+firmly.
+
+"Fancy!" she cried irrelevantly.  "I heard the other day that
+Sister Ann Frances had described me as the pride of the Baker
+Institution!"  She laughed with delight at the humour of it, and he
+smiled too.  When she laughed, he had nearly always now confidence
+enough to smile too.
+
+"You might ask for another six months."
+
+"Heavens, no!  No--I shall make up my mind."
+
+"Then you may go away," Arnold said.  They were standing at the
+crossing of the wide red road from which they would go in different
+directions.  She saw that the question was momentous to him.  She
+also saw how curiously the sun sallowed him, and how many more
+hollows he had in his face than most people.  She had a pathetic
+impression of the figure he made in his coarse gown and shoes.
+"God's wayfarer," she murmured.  There was pity in her mind,
+infinite pity.  Her thought had no other tinge.  It was a curiously
+simple feeling, and seemed to bring her an inconsistent lightness
+of heart.
+
+"Come too," she said aloud, "come and be a Clarke Brother where the
+climatic conditions suit you better.  The world wants Clarke
+Brothers everywhere."
+
+He looked at her and tried to smile, but his lips quivered.  He
+opened them in an effort to speak, gave it up, and turned away
+silently, lifting his hat.  Hilda watched him for an instant as he
+went.  His figure took strange proportions through the tears that
+sprang to her eyes, and she marvelled at the gaiety with which she
+had touched, had almost revealed, her heart's desire.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+"I knew it would happen in the end," Hilda said, "and it has
+happened.  The Archdeacon has asked me to tea."
+
+She was speaking to Alicia Livingstone in the dormitory, changing
+at the same time for a "turn" at the hospital.  It was six o'clock
+in the afternoon.  Alicia's landau stood at the door of the Baker
+Institution.  She had come to find that Miss Howe was just going on
+duty and could not be taken for a drive.
+
+"When?" asked Alicia, staring out of the window at the crows in a
+tamarind tree.
+
+"Last Saturday.  He said he had promised some friends of his the
+pleasure of meeting me.  They had besieged him, he said, and they
+were his best friends, on all his committees."
+
+"Only ladies?"  The crows, with a shriek of defiance at nothing in
+particular, having flown away, Miss Livingstone transferred her
+attention.
+
+"Bless me, yes.  What Archdeacon has dear men friends!  And
+lesquelles pense-tu, mon Dieu!"
+
+"Lesquelles?"
+
+"Mrs. Jack Forrester, Mrs. Fitz--what you may call him up on the
+frontier, the Brigadier gentleman--Lady Dolly!"
+
+"You were well chaperoned."
+
+"And--my dear--he didn't ask a single Sister!"  Hilda turned upon
+her a face which appeared still to glow with the stimulus of the
+archidiaconal function.  "And--it was wicked considering the
+occasion--I dropped the character.  I let myself out!"
+
+"You didn't shock the Archdeacon?"
+
+"Not in the least.  But, my dear love, did you ever permit yourself
+the reflection that the Venerable Gambell is a bachelor?"
+
+"Hilda, you shall not!  We all love him--you shall not lead him
+astray!"
+
+"You would not think of--the altar?"
+
+Miss Livingstone's pale small smile fell like a snowflake upon
+Hilda's mood, and was swallowed up.  "You are very preposterous,"
+she said.  "Go on.  You always amuse one."  Then, as if Hilda's
+going on were precisely the thing she could not quite endure, she
+said quickly, "The Coromandel is telegraphed from Colombo to-day."
+
+"Ah!" said Hilda.
+
+"He leaves for Madras to-morrow.  The thing is to take place there,
+you know."
+
+"Then nothing but shipwreck can save him."
+
+"Nothing but--what a horrible idea!  Don't you think they may be
+happy?  I really think they may."
+
+"There is not one of the elements that give people, when they
+commit the paramount stupidity of marrying, reason to hope that
+they may not be miserable.  Not one.  If he were a strong man I
+should pity him less.  But he's not.  He's immensely dependent on
+his tastes, his friends, his circumstances."
+
+Alicia looked at Hilda; her glance betrayed an attention caught
+upon an accidental phrase.  "The paramount stupidity."  She did not
+repeat it aloud, she turned it over in her mind.
+
+"You are thinking," Hilda said accusingly.  "What are you thinking
+about?"
+
+"Oh, nothing.  I saw Stephen yesterday.  I thought him looking
+rather wretched."
+
+A shadow of grave consideration winged itself across Hilda's eyes.
+
+"He works so much too hard," she said.  "It is an appalling waste.
+But he will offer himself up."
+
+Alicia looked unsatisfied.  She had hoped for something that would
+throw more light upon the paramount stupidity.  "He brought Mr.
+Lappe to tea," she said.
+
+The shadow went.  "Should you think Brother Lappe," Miss Howe
+demanded, "specially fitted for the cure of souls?  Never, never,
+could I allow the process of my regeneration to come through
+Brother Lappe.  He has such a little nose, and such wide pink
+cheeks, and such fat sloping shoulders.  Dear succulent Brother
+Lappe!"
+
+A Sister passed through the dormitory on a visit of inspection.
+Alicia bowed sweetly, and the Sister inclined herself briefly with
+a cloistered smile.  As she disappeared Hilda threw a black skirt
+over her head, making a veil of it flowing backward, and rendered
+the visit, the noiseless measured step, the little deprecating
+movements of inquiry, the benevolent recognition of a visitor from
+a world where people carried parasols and wore spotted muslins.
+She even effaced herself at the door on the track of the other to
+make it perfect, and came back in the happy expansion of an
+artistic effort to find Alicia's regard penetrated with the light
+of a new conviction.
+
+"Hilda," she said, "I should like to know what this last year has
+really been to you."
+
+"It has been very valuable," Miss Howe replied.  Then she turned
+quickly away to hang up the black petticoat, and stood like that,
+shaking out its folds, so that Alicia might not see anything
+curious in her face as she heard her own words and understood what
+they meant.  Very valuable!  She did understand, suddenly,
+completely.  Very valuable!  A year of the oddest experiences, a
+pictorial year, which she would look back upon, with its core in a
+dusty priest. . . .
+
+A probationer came rapidly along the dormitory to where Hilda
+stood.  She had the olive cheeks and the liquid eyes of the
+country; her lips were parted in a smile.
+
+"Miss Howe," she said, in the quick clicking syllables of her race,
+"Sister Margaret wishes you to come immediately to the surgical
+ward.  A case has come in, and Miss Gonsalvez is there, but Sister
+Margaret will not be bothered with Miss Gonsalvez.  She says you
+are due by right in five minutes,"--the messenger's smile broadened
+irresponsibly, and she put a fondling touch upon Hilda's apron
+string,--"so will you please to make haste!"
+
+"What's the case?" asked Hilda; "I hope it isn't another ship's
+hold accident."  But Alicia, a shade paler than before, put up her
+hand.  "Wait till I'm gone," she said, and went quickly.  The girl
+had opened her lips, however, but to say that she didn't know, she
+had only been seized to take the message, though it must be
+something serious since they had sent for both the resident
+surgeons.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+Dr. Livingstone's concern was personal, that was plain in the way
+he stood looking at the floor of the corridor with his hands in his
+pockets, before Hilda reached him.  Regret was written all over the
+lines of his pausing figure with the compressed irritation which
+saved that feeling in the Englishman's way from being too obvious.
+
+"This is a bad business, Miss Howe."
+
+"I've just come over--I haven't heard.  Who is it?"
+
+"It's my cousin, poor chap--Arnold, the padre.  He's been badly
+knifed in the bazar."
+
+The news passed over her and left her looking with a curious face
+at chance.  It was lifted a little, with composed lips, and eyes
+which refused to be taken by surprise.  There was inquiry in them,
+also a defence.  Chance, looking back, saw an invincible silent
+readiness, and a pallor which might be that of any woman.  But the
+doctor was also looking, so she said, "That is very sad," and moved
+near enough to the wall to put her hand against it.  She was not
+faint, but the wall was a fact on which one could, for the moment,
+rely.
+
+"They've got the man--one of those Cabuli money-lenders.  The
+police had no trouble with him.  He said it was the order of Allah--
+the brute!  Stray case of fanaticism, I suppose.  It seems Arnold
+was walking along as usual, without a notion, and the fellow sprang
+on him, and in two seconds the thing was done.  Hadn't a chance,
+poor beggar."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"Root of the left lung.  About five inches deep.  The artery pretty
+well cut through, I fancy."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"Oh no--we can't do anything.  The haemorrhage must be tremendous.
+But he may live through the night.  Are you going to Sister
+Margaret?"
+
+His nod took it for granted, and he went on.  Hilda walked slowly
+forward, her head bent, with absorbed uncertain steps.  A bar of
+evening sunlight came before her, she looked up and stepped outside
+the open door.  She was handling this thing that had happened,
+taking possession of it.  It lay in her mind in the midst of a
+suddenly stricken and tenderly saddened consciousness.  It lay
+there passively; it did not rise and grapple with her, it was a
+thing that had happened--in Burra Bazar.  The pity of it assailed
+her.  Tears came into her eyes, and an infinite grieved solicitude
+gathered about her heart.  "So?" she said to herself, thinking that
+he was young and loved his work, and that now his hand would be
+stayed from the use it had found.  One of the ugly outrages of
+life, leaving nothing on the mouth but that brief acceptance.  It
+came to hers with a note of the profound and of the supreme.  She
+turned resolutely from searching her heart for any wild despair.
+She would not for an instant consider what she ought to feel.
+"So," she said, and pressed her lips till they stopped trembling,
+and went into the hospital.
+
+She asked a question or two, in search of Sister Margaret and the
+new case.  It was "located," an assistant surgeon told her, in
+Private Ward Number Two.  She went more and more slowly toward
+Private Ward Number Two.
+
+The door was open; she stood in it for an instant with eyes nerved
+to receive the tragedy.  The room seemed curiously empty of any
+such thing, a door opposite was also open, with an arched verandah
+outside; the low sun streamed through this upon the floor with its
+usual tranquillity.  Beyond the arches, netted to keep the crows
+away, it made pictures with the tops of the trees.  There was the
+small iron bed with the confused outline under the bedclothes, very
+quiet, and the Sister--the whitewashed wall rose sharp behind her
+black draperies--sitting with a book in her hands.  Some scraps of
+lint on the floor beside the bed, and hardly anything else except
+the silence which had almost a presence, and a faint smell of
+carbolic acid, and a certain feeling of impotence and abandonment
+and waiting which seemed to be in the air.  Arnold moved on the
+pillow and saw her standing in the door.  The bars of the bed's
+foot were in the way, he tried to lift his head to surmount the
+obstruction, and the Sister perceived her too.
+
+"I think absolutely still was our order, wasn't it, Mr. Arnold?"
+she said, with her little pink smile.  "And I'm afraid Miss Howe
+isn't in time to be of much use to us, is she?"  It was the bedside
+pleasantry that expected no reply, that indeed forbade one.
+
+"I'm sorry," Hilda said.  As she moved into the room she detached
+her eyes from Arnold's, feeling as she did so that it was like
+tearing something.
+
+"There was so little to do," Sister Margaret said; "Surgeon-Major
+Wills saw at once where the mischief lay.  Nothing disagreeable was
+necessary, was it, Mr. Arnold?  Perfect quiet, perfect rest--that's
+an easy prescription to take."  She had rather prominent very blue
+eyes, and an aquiline nose, and a small firm mouth, and her pink
+cheeks were beginning to be a little pendulous with age.  Hilda
+gazed at her silently, noting about her authority and her flowing
+draperies something classical.  Was she like one of the Fates?  She
+approached the bed to do something to the pillow--Hilda had an
+impulse to push her away with the cry, "It is not time yet--
+Atropos!"
+
+"I must go now for an hour or so," the Sister went on.  "That poor
+creature in Number Six needs me; they daren't give her any more
+morphia.  You don't need it--happy boy!" she said to Stephen, and
+at the look he sent her for answer she turned rather quickly to the
+door.  Dear Sister, she was none of the Fates, she was obliged to
+give directions to Hilda standing in the door with her back turned.
+Happily for a deserved reputation for self-command they were few.
+It was chief and absolute that no one should be admitted.  A
+bulletin had been put up at the hospital door for the information
+of inquiries; later on when the doctor came again there would be
+another.
+
+She went away and they were left alone.  The sun on the floor had
+vanished; a yellowness stood in its place with a grey background,
+the background gaining, coming on.  Always his eyes were upon her,
+she had given hers back to him and he seemed satisfied.  She moved
+closer to the bed and stood beside him.  Since there was nothing to
+do there was nothing to say.  Stephen put out his hand and touched
+a fold of her dress.
+
+The room filled itself with something that had not been there
+before, his impotent love.  Hilda knelt down beside the bed and
+pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand
+that had so little more to do.  Then Arnold spoke.
+
+"You dear woman!" he said.  "You dear woman!"  She kept her head
+bowed like that and did not answer.  It was his happiest moment.
+One might say he had lived for this.  Her tears fell upon his hand,
+a kind of baptism for his heart.  He spoke again.
+
+"We must bear this," he panted.  "It is--less cruel--than it seems.
+You don't know how much it is for the best."
+
+She lifted her wet face.  "You mustn't talk," she faltered.
+
+"What difference--" he did not finish the sentence.  His words were
+too few to waste.  He paused and made another effort.
+
+"If this had not happened I would have been--counted--among the
+unfaithful," he said.  "I know now.  I would have abandoned--my
+post.  And gladly--without a regret--for you."
+
+"Ah!" Hilda cried, with a vivid note of pain.  "Would you?  I am
+sorry for that!  I am sorry!"
+
+She gazed with a face of real tragedy at the form of her captive
+delivered to her in the bonds of death.  A fresh pang visited her
+with the thought that in the mystery of the ordering of things she
+might have had to do with the forging of those shackles--the price
+of the year that had been very valuable.
+
+"My God is a jealous God," Arnold said.  "He has delivered me--into
+His own hands--for the honour of His name.  I acknowledge--I am
+content."
+
+"No, indeed no!  It was a wicked, horrible chance!  Don't charge
+your God with it."
+
+His smile was very sweet, but it paid the least possible attention.
+"You did love me," he said.  He spoke as if he were already dead.
+
+"I did indeed," Hilda replied, and bent her shamed head upon her
+hands again in the confession.  It is not strange that he heard
+only the affirmation in it.
+
+He stroked her hair.  "It is good to know that," he said, "very,
+good.  I should have married you."  He went on with sudden boldness
+and a new note of strength in his voice, "Think of that!  You would
+have been mine--to protect and work for.  We should have gone
+together to England--where I could easily have got a curacy--
+easily."
+
+Hilda looked up.  "Would you like to marry me now?" she asked
+eagerly, but he shook his head.
+
+"You don't understand," he said.  "It is the dear sin God has
+turned my back upon."
+
+Then it came to her that he had asked for no caress.  He was going
+unassoiled to his God, with the divine indifference of the dying.
+Only his imagination looked backward and forward.  And she thought,
+"It is a little light flame that I have lit with my own taper that
+has gone out--that has gone out--and presently the grave will
+extinguish that."  She sat quiet and sombre in the growing
+darkness, and presently Arnold slept.
+
+He slept through the bringing of a lamp, the arrival of flowers,
+subdued knocks of inquirers who would not be stayed by the
+bulletin--the visit of Surgeon-Major Wills, who felt his pulse
+without wakening him.  "Holding out wonderfully," the doctor said.
+"Don't rouse him for the soup.  He'll go out in about six hours
+without any pain.  May not wake at all."
+
+The door opened again to admit the probationer come to relieve Miss
+Howe.  Hilda beckoned her into the corridor.  "You can go back,"
+she said, "I will take your turn."
+
+"But the Mother Superior--you know how particular about the rules--"
+
+"Say nothing about it.  Go to bed.  I am not coming."
+
+"Then, Miss Howe, I shall be obliged to report it."
+
+"Report and be--report if you like.  There is nothing for you to do
+here to-night," and Hilda softly closed the door.  There was a
+whispered expostulation when Sister Margaret came back, but Miss
+Howe said, "It is arranged," and with a little silent nod of
+appreciation the Sister settled into her chair, her finger marking
+a place in the Church Service.  Hilda sat nearer to the bed, her
+elbow on the table, shading her eyes from the lamp, and watched.
+
+"Is it not odd," whispered Sister Margaret, as the night wore on,
+"he has refused to be confessed before he goes?  He will not see
+the Brother Superior--or any of them.  Strange, is it not?"
+
+Together they watched the quick short breathing.  It seemed
+strangely impossible to sleep against such odds.  They saw the
+lines of the face grow sharper and whiter, the dark eye-sockets
+sink to a curious roundness, a greyness gather about the mouth.
+There were times when they looked at each other in the last
+surmise.  Yet the feeble pulse persisted--persisted.
+
+"I believe now," said Sister Margaret, "that he may go on like this
+until the morning.  I am going to take half an hour's nap.  Rouse
+me at once if he wakes," and she took an attitude of casual repose,
+turning the Prayer-book open on her knee for readier use, open at
+"Prayers for the Dying."
+
+The jackals had wailed themselves out, and there was a long, dark
+period when nothing but the sudden cry of a night bird in the
+hospital garden came between Hilda and the very vivid perception
+she had at that hour of the value and significance of the earthly
+lot.  She lifted her head and listened to that, it seemed a
+comment.  Suddenly, then, a harsh quarrelling of dogs--Christian
+dogs--arose in the distance and died away, and again there was
+night and silence.  Night for hours.  Time for reflection, alone
+with death and the lamp, upon the year that had been very valuable.
+"I would have married you," she whispered.  "Yes, I would."  Later
+her lips moved again.  "I would have taken the consequence;" and
+again, "I would have paid any penalty."  There he lay, a burden
+that she would never bear, a burden that would be gone in the
+morning.  There were moments when she cried out on Fate for doing
+her this kindness.
+
+The long singing drone of a steamer's signal came across the city
+from the river, once, twice, thrice; and presently the sparrows
+began their twittering in the bushes near the verandah, an
+unexpected unanimous bird talk that died as suddenly and as
+irrelevantly away.  A conservancy cart lumbered past creaking; the
+far shrill whistle of an awakening factory cut the air from Howrah;
+the first solitary foot smote through the dawn upon the pavement.
+The light showed grey beyond the scanty curtains.  A noise of
+something being moved reverberated in the hospital below, and
+Arnold opened his eyes.  They made him in a manner himself again,
+and he fixed them upon Hilda as if they could never alter.  She
+leaned nearer him and made a sign of inquiry toward the sleeping
+Sister, with the farewells, the commendations of poor mortality
+speeding itself forth, lying upon her lap.  Arnold comprehended,
+and she was amazed to see the mask of his face charge itself with a
+faint smile as he shook his head.  He made a little movement; she
+saw what he wanted and took his hand in hers.  The smile was still
+in his eyes as he looked at her, and then at the cheated Sister.
+"I would have married you," she whispered passionately as if that
+could stay him.  "Yes, I would."
+
+So in the end he trusted the new wings of his mortal love to bear
+his soul to its immortality.  They carried their burden buoyantly,
+it was such a little way.  The lamp was still holding its own
+against the paleness from the windows when the meaning finally went
+out of his clasp of Hilda's hand, without a struggle to stay, and
+she saw that in an instant when she was not looking, he had closed
+his eyes upon the world.  She sat on beside him for a long time
+after that, watching tenderly, and would not withdraw her hand--it
+seemed an abandonment.
+
+
+
+Three hours later Miss Howe, passing out of the hospital gate, was
+overtaken by Duff Lindsay, riding, with a look of singular
+animation and vigour.  He flung himself off his horse to speak to
+her, and as he approached he drew from his inner coat pocket the
+brown envelope of a telegram.
+
+"Good-morning," he said.  "You do look fagged.  I have a--curious--
+piece of news."
+
+"Alicia told me that you were starting early this morning for
+Madras!"
+
+"I should have been, but for this."
+
+"Read it to me," Hilda said, "I'm tired."
+
+"Oh, do you very much mind?  I would rather--"
+
+She took the missive; it was dated the day before, Colombo, and
+read--
+
+
+"Do not expect me was married this morning to Colonel Markin S A we
+may not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers glory be to
+God Laura Markin"
+
+
+She raised her eyes to his with the gravest, saddest irony.
+
+"Then you--you also are delivered," she said; but he said "What?"
+without special heed; and I doubt whether he ever took the trouble
+to understand her reference to their joint indebtedness.
+
+"One hopes he isn't a brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal
+solicitude, "and can support her.  I suppose there isn't any way
+one could do anything for her.  I heard a story only yesterday
+about a girl changing her mind on the way out.  By Jove, I didn't
+suppose it would happen to me!"
+
+"If you are hurt anywhere," Hilda said absently, "it is only your
+vanity, I fancy."
+
+"Ah, my vanity is very sore!"  He paused for an instant, wondering
+to find so little expansion in her.  "I came to ask after Arnold,"
+he said.  "How is he?"
+
+"He is dead.  He died at half-past five this morning."
+
+She left him with even less than her usual circumstance, and turned
+in at the gate of the Baker Institution.  It happened to be the
+last day of her probation.
+
+
+
+There has never been any difficulty in explaining Lindsay's
+marriage with Alicia Livingstone even to himself; the reasons for
+it, indeed, were so many and so obvious that he wondered often why
+they had not struck him earlier.  But it is worth noting, perhaps,
+that the immediate precipitating cause arose in one evening service
+at the Cathedral, where it had its birth in the very individual
+charm of the nape of Alicia's neck, as she knelt upon her hassock
+in the fitting and graceful act of the responses.  His instincts in
+these matters seem to have had a generous range, considering the
+tenets he was born to, but it was to him then a delightful
+reflection, often since repeated, that in the sheltered garden of
+delicate perfumes where this sweet person took her spiritual
+pleasure there was no rank vegetation.
+
+It is much to Miss Hilda Howe's credit that amid the distractions
+of her most successful London season she never quite abandons these
+two to the social joys that circle round the Ochterlony Monument
+and the arid scenic consolations of the Maidan.  Her own experience
+there is one of the things, I fancy, that make her fond of saying
+that the stage is the merest cardboard presentation, and that one
+day she means to leave it, to coax back to her bosom the life which
+is her heritage in the wider, simpler ways of the world.  She never
+mentions that experience more directly or less ardently.  But I
+fear the promise I have quoted is one that she makes too often.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH OF A STAR ***
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