ore of an impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had
ever done before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had
greater relief, and her charm more freedom. Lindsay was there, and
Arnold glanced from one to the other of them, first with a start
then with a smile, at the recollection of Hilda's conception of their
relations. If this were a type and instance of hopeless love he had
certainly misread all the songs and sayings. He kept the idea in his
mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a pondering
smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in his curious
acumen in such an unwonted direction. It was a very flower of emotional
naivete, though a moment later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in
idleness; and indeed it might have abashed him to say what concern
it had in the mind of the Order of St. Barnabas. It was gratifying,
nevertheless, to have his observation confirmed by the way in which
Alicia leaned across him toward Lindsay with occasional references to
Laura Filbert, apparently full of light-heartedness, references which
Duff received in the square-shouldered matter-of-course fashion of his
countrymen approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe.
It was gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the
indrawing of his under-lip, a plaintive twist of expression which spoke
upon the faces of quite half the Order, of patience under privation.

The atmosphere was one of congratulation, the week's Gazette had
transformed Surgeon-Major Livingstone into Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel.
The officer thus promoted, in a particularly lustrous shirt bosom, made
a serious social effort to correspond, and succeeded in producing more
than one story of the Principal Medical Officer with her Majesty's
forces in India, which none of them had heard before. They were all
delighted at Herbert's step, he was just the kind of person to get a
step, and to get it rather early; a sense of the propriety of it mingled
with the general gratification. There was a feeling of ease among them,
too, of the indefeasibly won, which the event is apt to bring even when
the surgeon-lieutenant-colonelcy is most strikingly deserved. With no
strain imaginable one could see the relaxation.

"We can't do much in celebration," Lindsay was saying, "but I've got
a box at the theatre, if you'll come. Our people had some pomfret and
oysters over on ice from Bombay this morning, and I've sent my s