Arnold gave her a look of surprise.  “Surely not my cousin!” he protested.  “She can’t understand.”

“Oh, I beg of you, don’t speak to her!  I think she understands.  I think she’s only too tortuously intelligent.”

Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence.  “May I ask——?” he began formally.

“Oh, yes!  It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay herself.  It seems almost a liberty, doesn’t it, to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?” she went on, at Arnold’s blush; “but you asked me, you know.  And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about.  I think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl—­having her there constantly, and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away.  People in Alicia’s condition have no sense of immorality.”

“That makes it all the more painful,” said Arnold; but the interest in his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was not quite a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication between Alicia and Lindsay.  He sat for a moment without saying more, covering his eyes with his hand.

“Why should you care so much?” Hilda asked gently.  “You are at the very antipodes of her sect.  You can’t endorse her methods—­you don’t trust her results.”

“Oh, all that!  It’s of the least consequence.”  He spoke with a curious, governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes.  “It’s seeing another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that held, as best it could, a ray from the source.  It’s another glimpse of the strength of the tide—­terrible.  It’s a cruel hint that one lives above it in the heaven of one’s own hopes, by some mere blind accident.  To have set one’s feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world, and to feel the possibility of that——­”

“I see,” said Hilda, and perhaps she did.  But his words oppressed her.  She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat.  She was refreshed and vivified—­she wanted to talk of the warm world.  She let a decent interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his hand from his eyes.  Even then, to make the transition easier, she said, “You ought to be lifted up to-day, if you are going to baptise Kally Nath to-morrow.”

“The Brother Superior will do it.  And I don’t know—­I don’t know.  The young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes over to us——­”

“The young woman he is to marry!  Oh, my dear and reverend friend! Avec ces gens la! I have had a most amusing afternoon,” she went on, quickly.  “I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your halo.”  She was safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at any imputation of saintship.  He held himself a person of broad indulgences, and would point openly to his consumption of tea cakes.  But this afternoon a miasm hung over him.  Hilda saw it and bent herself, with her graphic recital, to dispel it, perceived it thicken and settle down upon him, and went bravely on to the end.  Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and spoke before him.  It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a matinee.