A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem, dropped from some coolie’s necklace.  Hilda picked it up and drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell.  She closed her eyes and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet.  All India and all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of dual perception of being near the core, the throbbing centre of the world’s meaning.

Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay.  He hastened to meet her, in his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that lay between them, and gave transit to her senses from that other plane.  They encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course.  It was a kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that they should meet and take a path together, he at least was aware.  Hilda asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said “Absolutely” with a shade of emphasis.  She charged him with having been a remarkable case, and he piled up illustrations of what he felt able to do in his convalescence.  There was something in the way he insisted upon his restoration which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.

“And I hear I may congratulate you,” she said.  “You have got what you wanted.”

“Someone has told you,” he retorted, “who is not friendly to it.”

“On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial support—­Alicia Livingstone.”

He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for the first time under such an aspect.

“She has been immensely kind,” he asserted, “but she wasn’t at first.  At first she was hostile, like you, only that her hostility was different, just as she is different.  She had to be converted,” he went on hopefully, “but it was less difficult than I imagined.  I think she takes a kind of pride in conquering her prejudices, and being true to the real breadth of her nature.”

“I am sure she would like her nature to be broad.  She might very well be content that it is charming.  And what is the difference between her hostility and mine?”

“The main difference,” Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon her, “is that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours”—­he made a dramatic gesture—­“walks between us.”

“I know.  I tried to stiffen her.  I appealed to the worst in her on your behalf.  But it wasn’t any use.  She succumbed, as you say, to her nobler instincts.”

Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent the grimness of this in twirling it.

“One can so easily get an affair of one’s own out of all proportion—­” Duff said.  “And I should be sorry—­do you really want me to talk about this?”

“Don’t be stupid.  Of course.”

He took her permission with plain avidity.