ent on as if she were
conscious of a stimulus.

"Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary
enough," she said: "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied
fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army. He is
Lord of our hosts."

"A kind of chant," murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware
that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism. Then
that impression was carried away, as it were, on a puff of air, and it
is hardly likely that she thought of it again.

"I suppose all the _elite_ go to the Cathedral," Laura said. The
sanctity of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon
it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little leaping tongue of some
other thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine and
narrowed her eyes.

"Dear me, yes," she said for Alicia. "His Excellency, the Viceroy, and
all his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their ladies,
Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under
Secretaries so thick they're kept in the vestibule till the bell stops.
'_And make thy chosen people joyful!_'" she intoned. "Not forgetting
Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to
the right of the main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit."

"You know already what a humbug she is!" Alicia said, but Captain
Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.

"Well, it would not be any attraction for me," she said, rising to go
through the little accustomed function of her departure. "I'll be going
now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again and I have to take her place
at the Believers' Meeting." She took Hilda's hand in hers and held it
for an instant. "Good-bye, and God bless you--in the way you most need,"
she said, and turned to Alicia, for whose ears Hilda's protests against
the girl's going broke meaninglessly about the room. "Good-bye. I am
glad to know that we will be one in the glad hereafter, though our paths
may diverge"--her eye rested with acknowledgment upon Alicia's
embroidered sleeves--"in this world. To look at you I should have
thought you were of the bowed down ones, not yet fully assured, but
perhaps you only want a little more oxygen in the blood of your
religion. Remember the word of the Lord--'Rejoice! again I say unto you,
rejoice!' Good-bye."

She drew her head-covering further forward and moved to the door. It
sloped to her should