The Livingstones and Duff Lindsay had come back, the people from Surrey having been sped upon their way to the Far East.  Stephen remembered with more than his usual relish an engagement to dine that evening in Middleton street.  He involuntarily glanced at his watch.  It was half-past one.  The afternoon looked arid, stretching between.  Consulting his tablets, he found that he had nothing that was really of any consequence to do.  There were items, but they were unimportant, transferable.  He had dismissed Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she helped to illumine showed seductively at the end of his day.  He made an errand involving a long walk, and came back at an hour which left nothing but evensong between him and eight o’clock.

He was suddenly aware, as he talked to her later, of a keener edge to his appreciation of the charm of Alicia Livingstone.  Her voyage, he assured her, had done her all the good in the world.  Her delicate bloom had certainly been enhanced by it, and the graceful spring of her neck and her waist seemed to have its counterpart in a freshened poise of the agreeable things she found to say.  It was delightful the way she declared herself quite a different being and the pleasure with which she moved, dragging fascinating skirts behind her, about the room.  She made more of an impression upon him on the aesthetic side than she had ever done before; she seemed more highly vitalised, her fineness had greater relief and her charm more freedom.  Lindsay was there, and Arnold glanced from one to the other of them, first with a start, then with a smile, at the recollection of Hilda’s conception of their relations.  If this were a type and instance of hopeless love he had certainly misread all the songs and sayings.  He kept the idea in his mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in his curious acumen in such an unwonted direction.  It was a very flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St. Barnabas.  It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned across him toward Lindsay with occasional references to Laura Filbert, apparently full of light-heartedness, references which Duff received in the square-shouldered, matter-of-course fashion of his countrymen approaching their nuptials in any quarter of the globe.  It was gratifying, and yet it enhanced in Stephen this evening the indrawing of his under-lip, a plaintive twist of expression which spoke upon the faces of quite half the Order of patience under privation.