ellows
under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and
out among the crowd, she looked abandoned; the sight of her in her bare
white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility
screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse
to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her
sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the _War Cry_. This was another
indignity; she offered them right and left, and no one had a pice for
her except one man, a sailor who refused the paper. When he rejoined his
companions there was a hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads
to look after her.

The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the "mem"
passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good. He, too,
looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan, a
man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard.
With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then
Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he
raised his arm, and Laura, in white astonishment, darted from under it.
They seldom did that.

Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it as Lindsay made his
stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and
fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that
it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the
manner of Duff's coming back to the girl, and the way in which, with a
look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He
was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and
final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he wanted
to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being
forgotten, stepping up to them. "Take her home in the carriage," she
said to Duff, "and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time
still--quite a long time." She stared at Captain-Filbert as she spoke,
but made no answer to the "Good-morning! God bless you!" with which the
girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down at
the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep
into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to
suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not
aware that she