Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded thought, “I had so little to make me think she cared.”  There was in it that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his invalid’s privileges as if he valued them.  He lay extended beside her among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.

“She told me it was not for your life she had been praying—­only that if you died you might be saved first.”  Her eyes were still on his hand, and she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse to some kind of action.  Then they relaxed again, and he said, “Oh, well,” and smiled at the balancings of a crow drinking at a city conduit.

That was all.  Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to postpone her impressions, even her emotions.  In the meantime it was something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to talk about the commonplaces of the roadside.  In her escape from this oppression, she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent pleasure in what they saw; everything had in some way the likeness of the leafing teak trees, tender and curative.  In the broad early light that lay over the tanks there was a vague allurement, almost a presage, and the wide spaces of the Maidan made room for hope.  She asked Lindsay presently if he would mind driving to the market; she wanted some flowers for that night.  I think she wanted some flowers for that hour.  Her thought broke so easily into the symbol of a rose.

They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink and crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared houses servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches in the sun and were shaved.  Where the street ran into shops there was still a shuttered blankness, but here and there a durwan[8] yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah.  The first boarding in a side street announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady Macbeth, under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy, with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete novelties for the same evening.  It made a cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy; there was something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan poster against the crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their shoes.  Talking of Hilda, they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a testimony to the difference of her.  In Alicia’s smile there was a satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of things.

[Footnote 8:  Doorkeeper.]