simple and fine and indisputable, this work of throwing the clear shadow of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world; it carried the boon of finality in itself.  One might be stopped and put away at any moment, and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and it absolutely barred out such considerations as were presented by Hamilton Bradley.  There was a time early in her probation when she thought seriously that if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be this.

She begged to be put on hospital work, and was sent for her indiscretion to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of British Troops.  The first duty of a novice was to be free of preference, to obey without a sigh of choice.  On the third day, however, Sister Ann Frances, supervising, stopped at the open schoolroom door to hear the junior female orphans repeating in happy chorus after their instructress the statement that seven times nine were fifty-six.  I think Hilda saw Sister Ann Frances in the door.  That couldn’t go on, even in the name of discipline, and Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the Chief Nursing Sister at the General Hospital next day.  Sister Ann Frances was inclined to defend Hilda’s imperfect acquaintance with primary arithmetic.

“We all have our gifts,” she said.  “Miss Howe’s is not the multiplication table; but neither is mine stage-acting.”  At which, the upper lip lengthened further into an upward curving smile, and the Mother Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe would develop one for making bandages, otherwise—­ And there for the time being the matter rested.

The depth of what was unusual in Hilda’s relation with Alicia Livingstone—­perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the ordinary feminine liens—­seems to me to be sounded in the tacit acceptance of Hilda’s novitiate on its merits that fell between the two women.  The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across which they joined hands, looking elsewhere.  Even in the surprise of Hilda’s announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation.  It had never been discussed, but it had to be accepted, and occasionally referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no implication of Stephen Arnold.  In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught it and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities.  It was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the essentials that enabled one to execute a flank movement like Hilda’s, not that she should conceive the first of them to be that one must come out of a cab.  She dismissed that impression with indignation as ungenerously cynical, but it always came back for redismissal.  It did not interfere in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to Stephen to come to Ten, Middleton Street, on afternoons or evenings when Hilda was there.  She was like one standing denied in the Street of Abundance; she had an avidity of the eye for even love’s reflection.