his beard.
With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then
Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled;
he raised his arm, and Laura in white astonishment darted from under it.
They seldom did that.

Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made his
stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and
fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that
it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the
manner of Duff's coming back to the girl and the way in which, with a
look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He
was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and
final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he
wanted to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being
forgotten, stepping up to them. "Take her home in the carriage," she
said to Duff, "and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time
still--quite a long time." She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke,
but made no answer to the "Good-morning! God bless you!" with which the
girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down
at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep
into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to
suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not
aware that she still held it, but that was the only rose she brought
away.

CHAPTER XVII

Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her, green where
the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and yellow in
the distance, where the light lay on the top of the withered grass. It
was like a great English park, with something of the village common,
only the trees, for the most part, made avenues over it, running an
arbitrary half-mile this way or that, with here and there a group dotted
about in the open; and the brimming tank-pots were of India, and of
nowhere else in the world. The sun was dipping behind the masts that
showed where the straight border of the river ran, and the shadows of
the pipals and the banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light
struck on the stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee
which made behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push
them back