rly British coast; their only
sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he
ought to find this person humourous. Then Laura came back and resolved
the situation.

"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have all
enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest mixture of
the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the
book, had no alternative.

"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went stumbling at the door.

"Mr. Harris," said Laura, equably, "found salvation about a month ago.
He is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage works
here. He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in
in the evening."

"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.

"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find
himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he
wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign
doesn't think there's any objection."

Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cane-bottomed chairs, her
_sari_ drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native
dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated
ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with
anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing,
Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him
seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something
disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a
unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her
knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock,
to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul's
sake to introduce her to a wider view of him.

"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly, it
seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile.
"Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"

"There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied
Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult"----he glanced at the lath
and plaster partition, but she, to whom publicity was a condition
salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no
interpretation for that.

"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our
tongues."

The misunderstanding was almost absurd, but h