with
that, can't he?"

"It is three times his fare," Arnold said austerely, "and he deserved
nothing--but a fine, perhaps." The man was suppliant before them,
cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda lifted her head
and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood
golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink
kite. Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when
she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.

"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."

It was the merest echo, and she had done it on purpose, but he could
not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands, and
turned and walked away with him, he was held in a frightened silence.
There was nothing perhaps that he wanted to talk of more than of
his experience at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and
explained; yet in that space of her two words the impossibility of
mentioning it had sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant
fervour, that she would refrain from any allusion to The Offence of
Galilee. And for the time being she did refrain. She said, instead,
that her hand was smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the
chemist would use a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look,
said very possibly not, but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of
the far-off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to
disagreeable necessities; covered a preposterous impulse to cry with
another smile.

A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his arms
full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery. "Oh, the
good man!" Hilda exclaimed. "My parcels!" and looked on equably, while
Arnold took them by their puckered ends. "I have been buying gold lace
and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume," she explained. The bags
dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers; he looked very much aware of
them. "Let me carry at least one," she begged. "I can perfectly with my
parasol hand;" but he refused her even one. "If I may be permitted to
take the responsibility," he said happily, and she rejoined, "Oh,
I would trust you with things more fragile." At which, such is the
discipline of these Orders, he looked steadily in front of him, and
seemed deaf with modesty.

"But are you sure," said Hilda, suddenly considerate, "that it looks
well?"

"Is the gold lace then so very meretricious?"

"It goes d