He took his seat and folded his arms almost eagerly; there was a light of concentration in his eye and a line of compression about his lips which had not marked his meditation upon Nourendra Lal.  The vigour in his face suggested that he found a kind of athletic luxury in what he had to think about.  Brother Colquhoun, with his flat hat clasped before his breast, passed down the aisle.  Stephen looked up with a trace of impatience.  Presently he rose hurriedly, as if he remembered something, and went and knelt before one of several paintings that hung upon the chapel walls.  They were old copies of great works, discoloured and damaged.  They had sailed round the Cape to India when the century was young, and a lady friend of the Mission had bought them at the sale of the effects of a ruined Begum.  Arnold was one of those who could separate them from their incongruous history and consecrate them over again.  He often found them helpful when he sought to lift his spirit, and in any special matter a special comfort.  He bent for ten minutes before a Crucifixion, and then hastened back to his place.  Only one reflection corrected the vigourous satisfaction with which he thought out Hilda’s proposition.  That disturbed him in the middle of it, and took the somewhat irrelevant form of a speculation as to whether the events of their last meeting should have had any place in his Thursday confession.  He was able to find almost at once a conscientious negative for it, and it did not recur again.

He got up reluctantly when the Mission bell sounded, and indeed he had come to the end of a very absorbing interest.  His decision was final against Hilda’s scheme.  His worn experience cried out at the sacrifice in it without the illumination—­which it would certainly lack—­of religious faith.  She confessed to the lack, and that was all she had to say about her motive, which, of course, placed him at an immense disadvantage in considering it.  But the question then descended to another plane, became merely a doubt as to the most useful employment of energy, and that doubt nobody could entertain long, nobody of reasonable breadth of view, who had ever seen her expressing the ideals of the stage.  Arnold did his best to ward off all consideration which he could suspect of a personal origin, but his inveterate self-sacrifice slipped in and counted, naturally enough, under another guise, counted against her staying.

He went to his room and wrote to Hilda at once, the kindest, simplest of letters, but conveying a definitely negative note.  He would have been perhaps more guarded, but it was so plainly his last word to her; Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure of his people in ten days’ time upon every blank wall.  So he gave himself a little latitude, he let in an undercurrent of gentle reminiscence, of serious assurance as to the difference she had made.  And when he had finally bade her begone to the light and fulness of her own life and fastened up his letter, he deliberately lifted it to his lips, and placed a trembling, awkward kiss upon it, like the kiss of an old man, perfunctory, yet bearing a tender intention.