but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."

"I _beg_ your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out.
Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp."

"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette between
her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it between her
first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end,
leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It
was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss
Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's
way of doing it.

"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said, contemplatively; "you're
young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and
enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so
little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the
common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something
quite different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there
was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be
dismissed between them.

"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She felt
delightfully terse and to the point.

"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know
him well?"

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of
them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would
have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.

"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the sensation
of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.
She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette, crisped over
with grey, in its blackened calyx.

"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to
the rest of the people--bah, you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its
torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know,
the way pancreatic influences can be idealised--made to serve ennobling
ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different."

"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her,
the asking note was in the word.

"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the
queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square to
look at his l