g
more and more your supreme good as the years go on."

"How much you give me credit for!"

"Not nearly enough--not nearly. Who is there like you?" he demanded,
simply.

His words seemed a baptism. She lifted up her face after them, and the
trace of them was on her eyes and lips. "I have passed two examinations,
at all events," she informed him, with sudden gaiety, "and Sister Ann
Frances says that in two or three months I shall probably get through
the others. Sister Ann Frances thinks me more intelligent than might be
expected. And if I do pass those examinations I shall be what they call
a quick-time probationer. I shall have got it over in six months. Do you
think," she asked, as if to please herself, "that six months will be
long enough?"

"It depends. There is so much to consider."

"Yes--it depends. Sometimes I think it will be, but oftener I think it
will take longer."

"I should be inclined to leave it entirely with the Sisters."

"I am so undisciplined," murmured Hilda. "I fear I shall cling to my own
opinion. Now we must overtake the others and you must walk the rest of
the way with Sister Ann--no, Sister Margaret, she is senior."

"I don't at all see the necessity," Stephen protested. He was wilful and
wayward; he adopted a privileged air, and she scolded him. In their
dispute they laughed so imprudently that Sister Ann Frances turned her
draped head to look back at them. Then they quickened their steps and
joined the elder ladies, and Stephen walked with Sister Margaret to the
door of the Institution. She mentioned to the Sister Superior afterward
that young Mr. Arnold was really a delightful conversationalist.

CHAPTER XXVII.

They talked a great deal in Plymouth about the way the time was passing
in Calcutta during those last three months before Laura should return,
the months of the rains. "Now," said Mrs. Simpson, early in July, "it
will be pouring every day, with great patches of the Maidan under water,
and rivers, my dear, _rivers_, in the back streets," and Laura had a
reminiscence about how, exactly at that time, a green mould used to
spread itself fresh every morning on the matting under her bed in
Bentinck street. Later on they would agree that perhaps by this time
there was a "break in the rains," and that nothing in the world was so
trying as a break in the rains, the sun grilling down and drawing up
steam from every puddle. In September things, they remembered, would be
at