wn 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