sionate."

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 wa