“They’ve got the man—­one of those Cabuli moneylenders.  The police had no trouble with him.  He said it was the order of Allah—­the brute.  Stray case of fanaticism, I suppose.  It seems Arnold was walking along as usual, without a notion, and the fellow sprang on him and in two seconds the thing was done.  Hadn’t a chance, poor beggar.”

“Where is it?”

“Root of the left lung.  About five inches deep.  The artery pretty well cut through, I fancy.”

“Then——­”

“Oh no—­we can’t do anything.  The haemorrhage must be tremendous.  But he may live through the night.  Are you going to Sister Margaret?”

His nod took it for granted and he went on.  Hilda walked slowly forward, her head bent, with absorbed, uncertain steps.  A bar of evening sunlight came before her, she looked up and stepped outside the open door.  She was handling this thing that had happened, taking possession of it.  It lay in her mind in the midst of a suddenly stricken and tenderly saddened consciousness.  It lay there passively; it did not rise and grapple with her, it was a thing that had happened—­in Bura Bazaar.  The pity of it assailed her.  Tears came into her eyes, and an infinite grieved solicitude gathered about her heart.  “So?” she said to herself, thinking that he was young and loved his work, and that now his hand would be stayed from the use it had found.  One of the ugly outrages of life, leaving nothing on the mouth but that brief acceptance.  It came to her with a note of the profound and of the supreme.  “So,” she said, and pressed her lips till they stopped trembling, and went into the hospital.

She asked a question or two, in search of Sister Margaret and the new case.  It was “located,” an assistant surgeon told her, in Private Ward Number 2.  She went more and more slowly toward Private Ward Number 2.

The door was open.  She stood in it for an instant with eyes nerved to receive the tragedy.  The room seemed curiously empty of any such thing.  A door opposite was also open, with an arched verandah outside; the low sun streamed through this upon the floor with its usual tranquillity.  Beyond the arches, netted to keep the crows away, it made pictures with the tops of the trees.  There was the small iron bed with the confused outline under the bedclothes, very quiet, and the Sister—­the whitewashed wall rose sharp behind her black draperies—­sitting with a book in her hands.  Some scraps of lint were on the floor beside the bed and hardly anything else, except the silence, which had almost a presence, and a faint smell of carbolic acid, and a certain feeling of impotence and abandonment and waiting which seemed to be in the air.  Arnold moved on the pillow and saw her standing in the door.  The bars of the bed’s foot were in the way.  He tried to lift his head to surmount the obstruction, and the Sister perceived her too.

“I think absolutely still was our order, wasn’t it, Mr. Arnold?” she said, with her little pink smile.  “And I’m afraid Miss Howe isn’t in time to be of much use to us, is she?” It was the bedside pleasantry that expected no reply, that indeed forbade one.