break in her own voice warned her, and she hurried out of
the room.

It was a foolish thing, and the Livingstones' old Karim Bux much
deplored it, but the miss-sahib had forgotten to give information
that the dinner of eight commanded a fortnight ago would not take
place--hence everything was ready in its sequence for this event, with a
new fashion of stuffing quails and the first strawberries of the season
from Dinapore. The feelings of Karim Bux in presenting these things to
a woman in the dress of a coolie are not important; but Alicia, for some
reason, seemed to find the trivial incident gratifying.

CHAPTER XV

Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white
sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a flagrant
ticca-gharry. The driver lay extended on the top of it, asleep, the syce
squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it perfunctorily with hay
from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind. A fringe of palms and ferns
in pots ran between the pillars, and orchids hung from above, shutting
out the garden where heavy scents stood in the sun, and mynas chattered
on the drive. The air was full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to
the lavish energy of growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the
compound rose the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue.
A long time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse,
uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.

Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped
handkerchief agreeably scented. The night nurse had realised herself
equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of practical
views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept from day to day
to see her patient fed, and hand him books and writing materials. She
had not even the duty of debarring visitors, but sat most of the time in
the dressing-room where echoes fell about her of the stories with which
riotous young men, in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's
convalescence. There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in
vain, to express her views upon such waste of scientific training. She
had Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his
sister's.

There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two women in
the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated these things
to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was alrea