Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness.  She lifted her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty suddenly revealed.

“Why aren’t you?” she said.  “I wonder, too.”

“I should like it enormously,” he laughed.  “I’ve lain awake at nights trying to find out why it isn’t so.  Perhaps you’ll be able to tell me.  I think it must be because she’s such a confoundedly good fellow.”

Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a shadow on the whiteness of her throat.  Her buffeting was over; she was full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.

“Oh, you mustn’t depend on me,” she said.  “But why are you going?  Don’t go.  Stay and have another cup of tea.”

CHAPTER III.

The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same terms at New College, and now found themselves again together in the social poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in Bentinck street.  It seems desirable to supply a reason why any one should be walking there, to begin with, any one, at all events, not a Chinaman or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture or an able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest glass of country spirits.  Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen represented the whole port.  The cramped, twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible aside, for three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black, but many shades of brown, written down in the census as “of mixed blood” and wearing still, through the degenerating centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril of the first Englishmen who came to conjugal ties of Hindustan.  The place sent up to the stars a vast noise of argument and anger and laughter, of the rattling of hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered in its exaggeration, the red turban of a policeman here and there denoted little more than a unit in the crowd.  There were gas-lamps, and they sent a ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside the banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.  They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for Bentinck street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together into the fog