onfess at once, that is
what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality
and self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee-time, isn't it?" Then
he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the
luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been
to him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a
little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical
attitudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she
could hardly have expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with
upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his
self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet
that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all
as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she
decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and
Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to
tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would
represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their
lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really
hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the
shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went
to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness
stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced
her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too
general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on
smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of
insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found
that he had forgotten it.

"Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said, and
the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought Hilda a
flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.

"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street," she
said, "but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.
Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help
knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty of her
well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity;
it was one of those least of little things which are enough.

Arn