use and
familiarity.

Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel distress,
but when he had read it, that emotion was somewhat lightened in him by
another sentiment.

"A community admirable in many ways," he murmured, refolding the page.
"Does he think he is insulting me!"

Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was inclined
to concede to Stephen's intermediary, he was compelled to recognise
without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of her profession,
had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of defensive operations. She
retired effectively into camp; the quarters in Crooked lane became her
fortified retreat, whence she issued only under escort and upon service
strictly obligatory. Succour from Arnold doubtless reached her by the
post; and Lindsay felt it an anomaly in military tactics that the same
agency should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with
which he strove to assault her position. Nor could Alicia induce any
_sortie_ to Middleton street. Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and
luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in reticence
and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal excuse. They
loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss Livingstone's shoulders,
these notes which bore so much the atmosphere of Crooked lane, and at
the same time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps,
best calculated to weigh upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them
at arm's length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted
out the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God bless
you, yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the
limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself
without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest
hope could creep to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw
him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the
body of this petrifaction, she was almost satisfied to abandon the pair,
to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which did
not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to
devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she
was so likely to encumber. The new French poet, the American novelist of
the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table many
days together for this reason. She so