d her cognisance. It may be remembered, too, that there was in the
very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an
imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.
Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering
doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her
imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a
superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were
facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.

She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under
which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself
answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and
left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would
not find any concessions of her own among its features if she could
help it. It was a trick she played upon her consciousness; she would not
look, but she could see without looking. She saw that which explained
itself to be best, fittest, most reasonable; and thus she sometimes
wandered with Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when there was no
matinee, through the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the
Pacific slope.

She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of
those steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to
possibilities. She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see her
then. She had not spoken to him since the night of the Viceroy's party,
when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-gharry to wish him
good-night, and he walked home alone under the stars, trying to remember
a line of Horace, a chaste one, about woman's beauty. She sent the note
by post. There was no answer; but that was as usual; there never was an
answer unless something prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes
before the time. When the time arrived she sat under the blue umbrellas
devising what she would say, creating fifty different forms of what he
would say, while the hands slipped round the clock past the moment that
should have brought his step to the door. Hilda noted it, and compared
her watch. A bowl of roses stood on a little table near a window; she
got up and went to it, bending over and rearranging the flowers. The
light fell on her and on the roses; it was a beautiful attitude, and
when at a footfall she looked up expectantly it was more beautiful. But
it w