fallen ill was only too probable.  Hilda looked from her bedroom window across the varying expanse of parapeted flat roofs and mosque bubbles that lay between her and College street, and curbed the impulse in her feet that would have resulted in the curious spectacle of Llewellyn Stanhope’s leading lady calling in person at a monastic gate to express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it was barred.  A situation, after all, could be too pictorial, looked at from the point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with grateful humour across her anxiety.  Alicia would have known; but both the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon with Duff Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey.  They were most anxious, Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them.  Could he in the end have gone?  There was, of course, the accredited fount and source of all information, the Brother Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda Howe apply for it?  Llewellyn might write for her:  but it was glaringly impossible that the situation should lay itself so far open to Llewellyn.  Looking in vain for resources she came upon an expedient.  She found a sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy.  On it she wrote with red ink in the cramped hand of the bazaar Kerani:[9]

[Footnote 9:  Hired writer.]

     “Sir:—­Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone
     mofussil or England as I have some small business with him.  Yours
     obedient servant,

     “Wun Sing.”

“It can’t be forgery,” she reflected, “since there isn’t a Wun Sing,” and added an artistic postscript, “Boots and shoes verry much cheap for cash.”  She made up the envelope to match and addressed it, with consistent illiteracy, to the head of the mission.  The son of the Chinese basketmaker, who dwelt almost next door, spoke neither English nor Hindustani, but showed an easy comprehension of her promise of backsheesh when he should return with an answer.  She had a joyful anticipation, while she waited, of the terms in which she should tell Arnold how she passed, disguised as a Chinese shoemaker, before the receptive and courteous consciousness of his spiritual senior; of how she penetrated, in the suggestion of a pig-tail and an unpaid bill, within the last portals that might be expected to receive her in the form under which, for example, certain black and yellow posters were presenting her to the Calcutta public at that moment.  She saw his scruples go swiftly down before her laughter and the argument of 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.