“You get these things so out of perspective,” Stephen said, “that I don’t think I should tell you if they were so.  But they’re not.  Kally Nath is to be baptised to-morrow.  We are certain to get our oratory.”

“I am very glad,” Hilda interrupted.  “When one prays for so long a time together it must be better to have fresh air.  It will certainly be better for Brother Colquhoun.  He seems to have such a weak chest.”

“It will be better for us all.”  Arnold seemed to reflect, across his tea-cup, how much better it would be.  Then he added, “I saw Lindsay last night.”

“Again?  And——­”

“I think it is perfectly hopeless.  I think he is making way.”

“Sickening!  I hoped you would not speak to him again.  After all—­another man—­it’s naturally of no use!”

“I spoke as a priest!”

“Did he swear at you?”

“Oh dear no!  He was rather sympathetic.  And I went very far.  But I could get him to see nothing—­to feel nothing.”

“How far did you go?”

“I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit sacrilege.  He seemed to think he could make it up to her.”

“If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed—­you don’t suspect the irony in it,” Hilda said.  “Pray who is to make it up to him?”

“I suppose there is that point of view.”

“I should think so, indeed!  But taking it, I despair with you.  I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before him.  I succeeded, too—­he gave me the most uncomfortable looks—­but I might as well have let it alone.  The great purpose of nature,” Hilda went on, putting down her cup, “reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to.  So she invents these temporary insanities.  And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.  That’s a platitude, I know,” she added, “but it’s irresistibly suggested.”

Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the room.  The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington’s substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all.  He looked at the wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm—­it was really something like that—­which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought him.

“From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn’t see it.  He seemed determined enough, but depressed and not hopeful.  I fancied she was being upheld—­I thought she would easily pull through.  Indeed, I wasn’t sure that there was any great temptation.  Somebody must be helping him.”

“The Devil, no doubt,” Hilda replied, concisely; “and with equal certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone.”