there was no matinee, through
the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.

She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of those
steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to
possibilities. She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see her
then. She had not spoken to him since the night of the Viceroy's party,
when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-gharry to wish him
good-night, and he walked home alone under the stars, trying to remember
a line of Horace, a chaste one, about woman's beauty. She sent the note
by post. There was no answer but that was as usual; there never was an
answer unless something prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes
before the time. Hilda sat under the blue umbrellas when the hour
arrived, devising with full heart-beats what she would say, creating
fifty different forms of what he would say, while the hands slipped
round the clock past the moment that should have brought his step to the
door. Hilda noted it and compared her watch. A bowl of roses stood on a
little table near a window; she got up and went to it, bending over and
rearranging the flowers. The light fell on her and on the roses; it was
a beautiful attitude, and when at a footfall she looked up expectantly
it was more beautiful. But it was only another boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves,
with a highly-varnished complexion, who took off his hat elaborately as
he passed the open door. Hilda became conscious of her use of the roses
and abandoned them. Presently she sat down on a Bentwood rocking-chair
and swayed to and fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence. Half an hour
later she was still sitting there. Her face had changed, something had
faded in it; her gaze at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when
she glanced at the empty door it was with timidity. Arnold had not come
and did not come.

The evening passed without explanation, and next morning the post
brought no letter. It was simplest to suppose that her own had not
reached him, and Hilda wrote again. The second letter she sent by hand,
with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature. The messenger
brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials, "J. L. for S.
A.," and there was no reply. There remained the possibility of absence
from Calcutta, of illness. That he should have gone away was most
unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only too probable. Hilda looked
from her bedroom window across the v