always there.  His lips set themselves together, and Mrs. Sand would have been encouraged in any scheme of practical utility by the lines that came about his mouth.  A brother in finance of some astuteness, who saw him scramble into his gharry, divined that with regard to a weighty matter in jute-mill shares pending, Lindsay had decided upon a coup, and made his arrangements accordingly.  He also went upon his way with a fresh impression of Lindsay’s undeniable good looks, as sometimes in a coin new from the mint one is struck with the beauty of a die dulled by use and familiarity.

Stephen Arnold, receiving his answer, composed himself to feel distress, but when he had read it, that emotion was somewhat lightened in him by another sentiment.

“A community admirable in many ways,” he murmured, refolding the page.  “Does he think he is insulting me!”

Whatever degree of influence, Jesuitical or other, Lindsay was inclined to concede to Stephen’s intermediary, he was compelled to recognise without delay that Captain Filbert, in the exercise of her profession, had not neglected to acquire a knowledge of defensive operations.  She retired effectively into camp; the quarters in Crooked lane became her fortified retreat, whence she issued only under escort and upon service strictly obligatory.  Succour from Arnold doubtless reached her by the post; and Lindsay felt it an anomaly in military tactics that the same agency should bring back upon him with a horrid recoil the letters with which he strove to assault her position.  Nor could Alicia induce any sortie to Middleton street.  Her notes of invitation to quiet teas and luncheons were answered on blue-lined paper, the pen dipped in reticence and the palest ink, always with the negative of a formal excuse.  They loosed the burden of her complicity from Miss Livingstone’s shoulders, these notes which bore so much the atmosphere of Crooked lane, and at the same time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh upon her conscience.  She saw it, holding them at arm’s length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable “God bless you, yours truly,” at the end.  They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep to emerge smiling upon the other side.  When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrifaction, she was almost satisfied to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance.  But this was a climax which did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to encumber.  The new French poet, the American novelist of the year, and a work by Mr.