ith baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the
profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest
freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered her
shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any heaviness
that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that might
rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for
purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must
have been aware of it, though as a matter of fact when she finally told
Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden
Gardens, where the yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the
morning sky; and so lost it.

He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterwards? The
yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road
trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless
going round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a
tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke
the silence afterwards she started as if in apprehension, but it
was only to say something that anybody might have said, about the
self-sacrificing energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert
belonged. Her assent was little and meagre; nothing would help her to
expand it. The Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton,
without a suggestive bone.

Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared." There was in it
that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under
pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his
invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay extended beside her
among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far
as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.

"She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only that if
you died you might be saved first." Her eyes were still on his hand, and
she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse. Then they
relaxed again, and he said, "Oh, well," and smiled at the balancings of
a crow drinking at a city conduit.

That was all. Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enoug