A thudding of bare feet overtook them.  It was the syce, with his arms full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery.  “Oh, the good man!” Hilda exclaimed, “My parcels!” and looked on equably, while Arnold took them by their puckered ends.  “I have been buying gold lace and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume,” she exclaimed.  The bags dangled helplessly from Arnold’s fingers; he looked very much aware of them.  “Let me carry at least one,” she begged.  “I can perfectly with my parasol hand;” but he refused her even one.  “If I may be permitted to take the responsibility,” he said, happily, and she rejoined, “Oh, I would trust you with things more fragile.”  At which, such is the discipline of these orders, he looked steadily in front of him and seemed deaf with modesty.

“But are you sure,” said Hilda, suddenly considerate, “that it looks well?”

“Is the gold lace, then, so very meretricious?”

“It goes doubtfully with your cloth,” she laughed, and instantly looked stricken with the conviction that she might better have said something else.  But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see no gibe in it, only a pleasant commonplace.

“It might look queer in Chowringhee,” he said, “but this is not a censorious public.”  Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, “They will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when it is plain that I might ride—­and they see me doing that every day.”

All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt did impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since humour goes so far to destroy the picturesque.  Hilda without the paper bags would have been vastly enough for contrast.  She walked—­one is inclined to dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being unintelligible—­in a wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk, rather frayed at the seams, a trifle spent in vulnerable places, surmounted by an extravagant collar and a Paris hat.  The dress was of artistic intention, inexpensively carried out, the hat had an accomplished chic; it had fallen to her in the wreck and ruin of a too ambitious draper of Coolgardie.  As a matter of fact it was the only one she had.  The wide sleeves ended a little below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long suede gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now her note of appreciation.  Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him.  Hilda’s lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of the dust from the road still lay