"Is it possible?" he exclaimed, and was beside her. "You are not hurt?"

"Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this." She held up her
right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck
the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine
it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with
anxiety so obviously deep and troubled that Hilda silently smiled. She
who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it
disproportionate.

"It's the merest scratch," she said, grave again to meet his glance.

"Indeed, I fear not." The priest made a solicitous bandage with his
handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. "It is quite
unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the nearest
chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a
vast amount of trouble--but I am walking."

"I will walk, too," Hilda said, readily. "I should prefer it, truly."
With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a
few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. "I
really can't afford any more," she said. "He can get his wheel mended
with that, can't he?"

"It is three times his fare," Arnold said, austerely, "and he deserved
nothing--but a fine, perhaps." The man was suppliant before them,
cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda lifted her head
and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood
golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink
kite. Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when
she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.

"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."

It was the merest echo and she had done it on purpose, but he could not
know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands and
turned and walked away with him, he had nothing to say. There was
nothing, perhaps, that he wanted to talk of more than of his experience
at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and explained; yet in
that space of her two words the impossibility of mentioning it had
sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant fervour, that she
would refrain from any allusion to _The Offence of Galilee_. And for the
time being she did refrain. She said, instead, that her hand was
smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would use
a carbolic lotion? Stephen, w