oubtfully with your cloth," she laughed, and instantly looked
stricken with the conviction that she might better have said something
else. But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see no gibe in it,
only a pleasant commonplace.

"It might look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a
censorious public." Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, "They
will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when
it is plain that I might ride--and they see me doing that every day."

All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt did
impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since humour goes
so far to destroy the picturesque. Hilda without the paper bags would
have been vastly enough for contrast. She walked--one is inclined to
dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being unintelligible--in a
wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk, rather frayed at the seams; a
trifle spent in vulnerable places, surmounted by an extravagant collar
and a Paris hat. The dress was of artistic intention inexpensively
carried out, the hat had an accomplished chic; it had fallen to her in
the wreck and ruin of a too ambitious draper of Coolgardie. As a matter
of fact it was the only one she had. The wide sleeves ended a little
below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long
suede gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself
buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in
that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside
her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something
less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint
uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this
accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's
lambent observation was everywhere, but most of all on him; a fleck of
the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a
perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets
of the thronging people, where yards of new-dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the
pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, golden-tongued Kali, half
visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
dishes and glass armlets and silver-gilt stands for the comfortable