cigarette took its proper note of
insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found
that he had forgotten it.

"Even in College street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said, and
the negative very readable in Arnold's silent brow brought Hilda a
flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.

"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College street," she said,
"but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.
Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help
knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty of her
well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity;
it was one of those least of little things which are enough.

Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again quickly, and
looked at the floor as he said he feared they were terribly out of it in
College street, for which, however, he had evidently no apology to
offer. He continued to look at the floor with a careful air, as if it
presented points pertinent to the situation. Hilda felt herself--it was
an odd sensation--too sunny upon the nooked, retiring current that
flowed in him. He might have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that
Alicia made, but she was aware that he did not, that he was struggling
through her strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He
stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled as if
he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked, making light
accusations against the rigours of the Mission House, complaining of her
cousin that he was altogether given over to bonds and bands, that she
personally would soon cease to hold him in affection at all; she saw so
little of him it wasn't really worth while.

This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other end
of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the firm,
lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.

"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules
should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times a
year." She spoke with a kind of grave brightness: it was difficult to
know whether she was altogether in jest.

"There would be a secession all over the place," Arnold responded, with
his repressed smile. "You would get any number of probatione