m hour to hour. If her
ideas about it--she kept them carefully in solution--could have been
precipitated they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her
brother, the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.

She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went
together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the carriage at
a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven o'clock, and the
morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river. There was a white
light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and
delicately purple to the west. The dust slept on the broad roads of the
Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel of
a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the
streets that knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving
past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country
people with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the
profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest
freedom in the wide, tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered
her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any
heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that
might rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for
purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must
have been aware of it, though, as a matter of fact, when she told
Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden
Gardens, where the yellow dome of the Post Office swelled against the
morning sky, and so lost it.

He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterward? The yellow
dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road trended
the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless going
round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a tree,
and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke the
silence afterward, she started as if in apprehension, but it was only to
say something that anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing
energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged. Her assent
was little and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it. The
Salvation Army rose befo