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. One 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 familiar strains of the Salvation Army rising aft. Laura immediately cried, "I shall have friends among the passengers," and Mrs. Simpson so fair 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 eternity. And persons unprepared to give satisfaction upon this point—one fears there are always many 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 inspired 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 in prayer 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 toward 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 afterward, and pleased," he look 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 the 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 cabin 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 port-hole 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 inseparable 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 toward your gentleman, toward 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 expand, their mutual bond to strengthen, in the close confines of life on board ship, and as if to seal it and sanctify it 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 southeast 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 furthermost 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 a couple of brass compasses. 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, and one or two lesser fantasies.

"Jewelry!" 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 crucify Him afresh daily, 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 jewelry. 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."

While the Coromandel was throbbing out her regulation number of knots toward 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 Sunder-bunds; instead of it, one met around 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 brought 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. 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.

"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 seemed nearly always now to have 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 dusty gown and shoes. "God's wayfarer," she murmured.

"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 in her eyes, and she marvelled at the lightness with which she had touched, had almost revealed, her heart's desire.

"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 Archdiaconal 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 snow-flake 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. She did not repeat it, 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. "He brought Mr. Lappe to tea," Miss Howe said.

The shadow went. "Should you think Brother Lappe," she 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 tack 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.

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.

Doctor 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 bazaar."

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, a retreat. 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 moneylenders. 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 hæmorrhage 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 Bura Bazaar. 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 her with a note of the profound and of the supreme. "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 2. She went more and more slowly toward Private Ward Number 2.

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 were 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 6 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. In obedience to it 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 regret—for you."

"Ah!" Hilda cried with a vivid note of pain, "I am sorry! 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.

"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, 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 Sister 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 her 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. Then a harsh quarrelling of dogs—Christian dogs—arose in the distance and died away, and again there was night and silence. Suddenly 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 nearest 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 change 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.

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:

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.

"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 before. 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 overwhelming 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.