“I would go further,” she said, and looked as if some other thing charged with sweetness had come before her.

“And even if one gained, one would never trust one’s success,” Alicia faltered.

“Ah, if one gained one would hold,” Hilda said; and while she smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came upon her lips.  As if she knew her betrayal already complete, “I wish I had such a chance,” she said.

Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the Promised Land.

“Then after all he has prevailed,” she said.

“Who?”

“Hamilton Bradley.”

Hilda laughed—­the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it beautiful.

“How you will hold me to my metier,” she said.  “Hamilton Bradley has given up trying.”

“Then——­”

“Then think!  Be clever.  Be very clever.”

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands.  A turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual.  Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their astonishment.

“Well?” said Hilda.

“I can think of no one—­there is no one—­except—­oh, it’s too absurd!  Not Stephen—­poor dear Stephen!”

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda’s face, as if for an instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable.  Then the light came back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.

“I admit the absurdity.  Stephen—­poor dear Stephen.  How odd it seems,” she went on, while Alicia gazed, “the announcement of it—­like a thing born.  But it is that—­a thing born.”

“I don’t understand—­in the least,” Alicia exclaimed.

“Neither do I. I don’t indeed.  Sometimes I feel like a creature with its feet in a trap.  The insane, insane improbability of it!” She laughed again.  It was delicious to hear her.

“But—­he is a priest!”

“Much more difficult.  He is a saint.”

Alicia glanced at the floor.  The record of another lighter moment twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.

“Are you quite certain?” she said.  “You told me once that—­that there had been other times.”

“They are useful, those foolish episodes.  They explain to one the difference.”  The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost ranged her hostile.  She hurried out of that position.

“If it were possible,” she said, frowning at her embarrassment.  “I see nothing—­nothing really—­against it.”

“I should think not!  Can’t you conceive what I could do for him?”

“And what could he do for you?” Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.