her
tender anxiety, which she was quite prepared to learn foolish and
unnecessary. There was even an adventurous instant in which she leaped
at actual personation, and she looked in rapture at the vivid risk of
the thing before she abandoned it as involving too much. She sent no
receipt-form this time--that was not the practice of the bazaar--and
when, hours after, her messenger returned with weariness, and dejection
written upon him in the characters of a perfunctory Chinese smile, she
could only gather from his negative head and hands that no answer had
been given him, and that her expedient had failed.

Hilda stared at her dilemma. Its properties were curiously simple. His
world and hers, with the same orbit, had no point of contact. Once
swinging round their eastern centre, they had come close enough for
these two, leaning very far out, to join hands. When they loosed it
seemed they lost.

The more she gazed at it the more it looked a preposterous thing that in
a city vibrant with human communication by all the methods which make it
easy, it should be possible for one individual thus to drop suddenly and
completely from the knowledge of another--a mediaeval thing. Their
isolation as Europeans of course accounted for it; there was no medium
in the brown population that hummed in the city streets. Hilda could not
even bribe a servant without knowing how to speak to him. She ravaged
the newspapers; they never were more bare of reference to consecrated
labours. The nearest approach to one was a paragraph chronicling a
social evening given by the Wesleyans in Sudder street, with an
exhibition of the cinematograph. In a moment of defiance and
determination she sent a telegram studiously colourless. "Unable find
you wish communicate please inform. A. Murphy." He had never forgotten
the incongruity she was born to: in occasional scrupulous moments he
addressed her by it; he would recognise and understand. There was no
reply.

The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it,
waiting. His silence added itself up, brought her a kind of shame for
the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the further
schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her unsuccessful
efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them increased it. His
behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting against it twenty
potential explanations, but not the futility of what she had done. Her
resentment of th