with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there, a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came round.  After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the fullest privacy of which she was capable.  The gravity which the gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the “amount”; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount.  Even Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate.  These, when they fell, he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four hours he would not see her again.  Her intonation went with them and her face; they lived on that.  They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the manner of their intention.  After the first quarter of an hour, it is to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of emotional hypnotism.  He recognised his situation plainly enough, and there was no appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for example, could properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.

On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which he meditated mostly with his eyes on the floor.  His attitude was one quite adapted to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into.  When Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of the room.  She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he almost immediately began to read his life; and it was because he thought he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest, with her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck Street, and said with directness, “I should like to come and see you.  When may I?  Any time that suits you.  Have you half an hour to spare to-morrow?”

It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory.  Not the frankness though, or the touch of “Now we are getting to business,” that stood in her expression.  She looked alert and pleased.

“You would like to have a little talk, wouldn’t you?” she said.  Her manner took Lindsay a trifle aback; it suggested that she conferred this privilege so freely.  “To-morrow—­let me see, we march in the morning, and I have an open-air at four in the afternoon—­the Ensign takes the evening meeting.  Yes, I could see you to-morrow about two or about seven, after I get back from the Square.”  It was not unlike a professional appointment.