"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