ives for."

"Well," Duff declared, "I can imagine higher ends."

"You're not abusing Hilda!" Alicia said, addressing the olive.

"Not at all. Only vindicating you."

It did single them out, this fencing. Herbert and Arnold sat as
spectators, pushed, in a manner, aside.

"I suppose she will be off soon," Livingstone said.

"Oh, dreadfully soon. On the fifteenth. I had a note from her to-day."

"Did she say she was going?" Stephen asked quickly.

"She mentioned the Company--she is the Company surely."

"Oh, undoubtedly. May I--might I ask for a little more soda-water,
Alicia?" He made the request so formally that she glanced at him with
surprise.

"Please do--but isn't it very odious, by itself, that way? I suppose we
shouldn't leave out Hamilton Bradley--he certainly counts."

"For how much?" inquired her brother. "He's going to pieces."

"Hilda can pull him together again," Lindsay said incautiously.

"Has she an influence for good--over him?" Stephen inquired, and cleared
his throat. He caught a glance exchanged, and frowned.

"Oh yes," Duff said, "I fancy it is for good. For good, certainly. The
odd part of it is that he began by having an influence over her which
she declares improved her acting. So that was for good, too, as it
turned out. I think she makes too much of him. To my mind he speaks like
a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like a bit of consecrated
stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and his thin lips, and his thin
eyebrows. Personally, I'm sick of his eyebrows."

"They'll end by marrying," said Surgeon-Lieut.-Colonel Livingstone.

"HERBERT! How little you know her!"

"It's possible enough," Duff said, "especially if she finds him in any
way necessary to her production of herself. Hilda has knocked about too
much to have many illusions. One is pretty sure she would place that
first."

"You are saying a thing which is monstrous!" cried Alicia.

Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction. "She'll have to marry
him to get rid of him," he said. "Fancy the opportunities of worrying
her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!"

"Oh, if you think Hilda could be WORRIED into anything!" Miss
Livingstone exclaimed derisively. "If the man were irritating, do you
suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means?--"

"She would have him put in irons, no doubt," Herbert retorted, "or
locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the ship's butcher."

The t