is usual relish an engagement to dine that evening in
Middleton street. He involuntarily glanced at his watch. It was
half-past one. The afternoon looked arid, stretching between. Consulting
his tablets, he found that he had nothing that was really of any
consequence to do. There were items, but they were unimportant,
transferable. He had dismissed Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she
helped to illumine showed seductively at the end of his day. He made an
errand involving a long walk, and came back at an hour which left
nothing but evensong between him and eight o'clock.

He was suddenly aware, as he talked to her later, of a keener edge to
his appreciation of the charm of Alicia Livingstone. Her voyage, he
assured her, had done her all the good in the world. Her delicate bloom
had certainly been enhanced by it, and the graceful spring of her neck
and her waist seemed to have its counterpart in a freshened poise of the
agreeable things she found to say. It was delightful the way she
declared herself quite a different being and the pleasure with which she
moved, dragging fascinating skirts behind her, about the room. She made
more of an impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had ever
done before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had greater
relief and her charm more freedom. Lindsay was there, and Arnold glanced
from one to the other of them, first with a start, then with a smile, at
the recollection of Hilda's conception of their relations. If this were
a type and instance of hopeless love he had certainly misread all the
songs and sayings. He kept the idea in his mind and went on regarding
her in the light of it with a pondering smile, turning it over and
finding a lively pleasure in his curious acumen in such an unwonted
direction. It was a very flower of emotional _naivete_, though a moment
later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it
might have abashed him to say what concern it had in the mind of the
Order of St. Barnabas. It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his
observation confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned across him
toward Lindsay with occasional references to Laura Filbert, apparently
full of light-heartedness, references which Duff received in the
square-shouldered, matter-of-course fashion of his countrymen
approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe. It was
gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the indrawing of