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