“Yes?” Miss Livingstone’s intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.

“We have done some interesting things together here.  He has shown me the queerest places.  Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square, to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it.”

“A statue?”

“No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people.  She wasn’t new to me—­I knew her before he did—­but the picture was, and the performance.  She stood poised on a coolie’s basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel—­I mean a dropped one.  Light seemed to come from her, from her hair or her eyes or something.  I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended.”

“It sounds most unusual,” Alicia said, with a light smile.  Her interest was rather obviously curbed.

“It happens every day, really, only one doesn’t stop and look; one doesn’t go round the corner.”

There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss Livingstone’s desire to be informed.

Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and waited.  The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.

“And I regret to say it was I who introduced them,” she said.

“Introduced whom?”

“Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army.  They met at Number Three; she had come after my soul.  I think she was disappointed,” Hilda went on tranquilly, “because I would only lend it to her while she was there.”

“Of the Salvation Army!  I can’t imagine why you should regret it.  He is always grateful to be amused.”

“Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude.  He is rather intense about it.  And—­I don’t know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay’s account.  Did I say so?” They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia’s crude blush—­everything else about her was so perfectly worked out—­cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up.  “Perhaps though,” Hilda hurried on with a pang, “we generalise too much about the men.”

What Miss Livingstone would have found to say—­she had certainly no generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay—­had not a servant brought her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider.  The card saved her the necessity.  She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then exclaimed, “My cousin, Stephen Arnold!  He’s a reverend—­a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in here.  What shall we do with our cigarettes?”

Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.

“Yours has gone out again, so it doesn’t much matter, does it?  Drown the corpse in here, and I’ll pretend it belongs to me.”  She pushed the finger-bowl across, and Alicia’s discouraged remnant went into it.  “Don’t ask me to sacrifice mine,” she added, and there was no time for remonstrance; Arnold’s voice was lifting itself at the door.