ther kind of
support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed. Lindsay
was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for
four and five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal
staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbow up, he was indistinctly
convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the
club. The next evening's meeting saw his place empty under the window of
the hall in Crooked lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of
these exercises. The world shrank, for Laura, to the compass of the
kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against which
she must key herself to indifference. When on the second and third
evenings she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her that
either she or Mr. Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she offered up
thanks. On the fourth she reflected recurrently and anxiously that it
was not after all a very glorious victory if the Devil had carried off
the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the opportunities that had been his,
should slip back without profit to the level from which she had
striven--they had all striven--to lift him. Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to
be buffeted by such speculations, sent a four-anna bit to the head
bearer at the club on her own account and obtained information.

Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the
circumstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which Mrs.
Barberry came for hours to take advantage of. There were the usual two
nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the Arab further
afield than ever, and she did. One can imagine her cantering fast and
far with a sense of conscious possession in spite of Mrs. Barberry and
the two nurses. There may be a certain solace in the definite and
continuous knowledge available about a person hovering on the brink of
typhoid under your own roof tree. It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major
Livingstone could not make up his mind. Alicia knew only of this
uncertainty; other satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs.
Barberry. She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so
uniformly cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from
Lindsay's room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the temperature
was the same, hadn't budged a point, must manage to get it down somehow
in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to envelop himself in the
newspapers. Those arbit