She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would not find any concessions among its features if she could help it.  It was a trick she played upon her own consciousness; she would not look; but she could see without looking.  She saw that which explained itself to be best, fittest, most reasonable, and thus she sometimes wandered with Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when 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