Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing Lindsay’s room, for her own lay beyond it.  In the seven o’clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tip-toe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep.  “Ayah!” she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert’s face.  Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the direction of her skirts.  She stood silent, stricken in the dusk with fear and wonder, but the sense that was strangest in her was plainly that of having made a criminal discovery.  Laura stumbled upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant; words held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door.  Then Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, further on, a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both.  It was a spacious room, with pale, high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebon crucifix over the bed.  Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet table.  Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden cut all its fronds sharply against the light.

“Well?” said Alicia, when the door was shut.

Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.

“I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone out.  And the nurse was in the room; I couldn’t get to her.  There was nobody but the servants about.”

“Objection to what?”

“To my being there.  I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay.”

“Did you make any noise?”

Miss Filbert looked professionally touched.  “It was silent prayer, of course,” she said.

Alicia, standing with one hand upon the toilet table, had an air of eagerness, of successful capture.  The yellow sky in the window behind her made filmy lights round her hair and outlined her tall figure in the gracefulness of which there was a curious crisped effect, like a conventional pose taken easily, from habit.  Laura Filbert thought she looked like a princess.

“I seem to hear of nothing but petitions,” she said.  “Isn’t somebody praying for you?”

The blood of any saint would have risen in false testimony at such a suggestion.  Laura blushed so violently that for an instant the space between them seemed full of the sound of her protest.

“I hope so, miss,” she said, and looked as if for calming over Alicia’s shoulder away into the after-sunset bars along the sky.  The colour sank back out of her face, and the light from the window rested on it ethereally.  The beautiful mystery drew her eyes to seek, and their blue seemed to deepen and dilate, as if the old splendour of the uplifted golden gates rewarded them.