fice will not endure,
you know."

"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim,
and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without
speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river and
left something chill and empty in the spaces about them. Things grew
hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace,
grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very near.
"What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the
vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"

Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness
far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said with
apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She
made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if
the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he
kept her hand while he said, "You will always represent something in
mine. I can depend upon you--I shall know that you are there."

"Yes," she said, sincerely, "Yes, indeed;" and it seemed to her that he
looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was only
another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to
walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever has taken a good
deal out of you."

CHAPTER XVIII.

Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof
followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at
one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared
entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a
rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust.
It gave a soothing wistulness to discontent to think this, which a
discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as
she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south
wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly,
however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things
require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command
over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There
was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or
one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the
days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
worthlessness. She turned aw