er Institution. It happened to be the last day of
her probation.

* * * * *

There has never been any difficulty in explaining Lindsay's marriage
with Alicia Livingstone even to himself. The reasons for it, indeed,
were so many and so obvious that he wondered often why they had not
struck him before. But it is worth noting, perhaps, that the immediate
precipitating cause arose in one evening service at the Cathedral, where
it had its birth in the very individual charm of the nape of Alicia's
neck, as she knelt upon her hassock in the fitting and graceful act of
the responses. His instincts in these matters seem to have had a
generous range, considering the tenets he was born to, but it was to him
then a delightful reflection, often since repeated, that in the
sheltered garden of delicate perfumes where this sweet person took her
spiritual pleasure there was no rank vegetation.

It is much to Miss Hilda Howe's credit that amid the overwhelming
distractions of her most successful London season she never quite
abandons these two to the social joys that circle round the Ochterlony
Monument and the arid scenic consolations of the Maidan. Her own
experience there is one of the things, I fancy, that make her fond of
saying that the stage is the merest cardboard presentation, and that one
day she means to leave it, to coax back to her bosom the life which is
her heritage in the wider, simpler ways of the world. She never mentions
that experience more directly or less ardently. But I fear the promise I
have quoted is one that she makes too often.

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