u needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.

The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river
at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been
completed over night; indeed she slept on board, and Duff had only the
duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her
in a sequestered corner of the fresh swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her
Army clothes--she had come on board in one of the muslins--and she was
softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid
tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane,
the over-ruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come
apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no
more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.

"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you,
We've laboured together, united in heart,
But now we must close and soon we must part."

They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they
evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside
the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a
consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to
a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between
the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless as she presently turned
a calmed face to him with her pale apology he had the sensation of
a rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted
muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of
smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he reflected
that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.

The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood, were
to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency
the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an
assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose
almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make if you like, with the
geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case--he
could almost have demanded an explanation--since it was one of those
parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus
of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then