below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long suede
gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself
buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in
that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside her;
he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something less
impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint
uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this
accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's
lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of
the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a
perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets
of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the
pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half
visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and
silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line
upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference. So they
passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.

They talked of the accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?" Hilda
said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to
which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal
robes worn every day.

"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly to be
persuaded."

"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she
adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She
did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The
necessity for feeling such a vast emotion--I shouldn't know how to cope
with it."

"I will claim to have saved your other hand," he smiled. "You will be
quite grateful enough for that."

She noted that he did not hasten, behind pyramidal blushes, into the
shelter of a general disavowal. The cassock seemed to cover an
obligation to acknowledge things.

"I see," she said, veering round. "You are quite right to circumscribe
me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out. It is
only the absence of it, too plainly expressed