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 that undermined all the fairness of her logic, and even triumphed over the sword of her suspense.  She never quite gave up the struggle, but in effect she passed the week that intervened pinioned in her unreason—­bands that vanished as she looked at them, only to tie her thrice in another place.

Life became a permanent interrogation-point.  Waiting under it, with a perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy.  The sun of March had been increasing, and the air that Saturday afternoon had begun to melt and glow and hang in the streets with a kind of inertia, like a curtain that had to be parted to be penetrated.  Hilda came into the house and faced the stairs with an inclination to leave her body on the ground floor and mount in spirit only.  When she glanced in at the drawing-room door and saw Arnold sitting under the blue umbrellas, a little paler, a thought more serene than usual, she swept into the room as if a tide carried her, and sank down upon a foot-stool close to him, as if it had dropped her there.  He had risen at her appearance.  He was all himself but rather more the priest; his face of greeting had exactly its usual asking intelligence, but to her the fact that he was normal was lost in the fact that he was near.  He held out his hand, but she only sought his face speechless, hugging her knees.