as only another boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves, with a highly varnished
complexion, who took off his hat elaborately as he passed the open
door. She became conscious of her use of the roses, and abandoned them.
Presently she sat down on a bentwood rocking-chair, and swayed to and
fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence. Half an hour later she was still
sitting there. Her face had changed, something had faded in it; her gaze
at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when she glanced at the
empty door it was with timidity. Arnold had not come and did not come.

The evening passed without explanation, and next morning the post
brought no letter. It was simplest to suppose that her own had not
reached him, and Hilda wrote again. The second letter she sent by hand,
with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature. The messenger
brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials, "J. L. for S.
A.," and there was no reply. There remained the possibility of absence
from Calcutta, of illness. That he should have gone away was most
unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only too probable. Hilda looked
from her bedroom window across the varying expanse of parapeted flat
roofs and mosque bubbles that lay between her and College Street, and
curbed the impulse in her feet that would have resulted in the curious
spectacle of Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady calling in person at a
monastic gate to express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it
was barred. A situation after all could be too pictorial, looked at
from the point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with
grateful humour across her anxiety. Alicia would have known; but both
the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon, with Duff
Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey. They were most anxious,
Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them. Could he in the end
have gone? There was, of course, the accredited fount and source of all
information, the Father Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda
Howe apply for it! Llewellyn might write for her; but it was glaringly
impossible that the situation should lay itself so far open to
Llewellyn. Looking in vain for resources she came upon an expedient. She
found a sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy. On it
she wrote with red ink, in the cramped hand of the hired scribe of the
bazar:--

"SIR--Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone mofussil
or En