d I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In matters
of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"

"Oh, Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss Filbert
now?"

"At No. 10, Middleton street."

"With the Livingstones?"

"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her
kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and
Laura is to stay with them until she sails."

"She sails?"

"In the _Sutlej_, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She
really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating
old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old
friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got
a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if
it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her
outfit together."

"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you."

"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."

"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"

"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I
would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one
offer her up at their dinner-tables?"

"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.

The coolie-track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where
it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing
about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf under-foot. The
cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man little way off was a man and
not a horse but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let
us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay
dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket
chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that
direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling
city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out,
topaz points in the level glow.

"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see
its proportions more clearly now."

Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good
sort, Duff," she said, "I wish you were out of Asia."

"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined
himself to see.

"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacri