“Is it possible!” he exclaimed, and was beside her.  “You are not hurt?”

“Only scraped, thanks.  I am lucky to get off with this.”  She held up her right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck the road.  Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch.  He looked at it with anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that Hilda silently smiled.  She who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it disproportionate.

“It’s the merest scratch,” she said, grave again to meet his glance.

“Indeed, I fear not.”  The priest made a solicitous bandage with his handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified.  “It is quite unpleasantly deep.  You must let me take you at once to the nearest chemist’s and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a vast amount of trouble—­but I am walking.”

“I will walk too,” Hilda said readily.  “I should prefer it, truly.”  With her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a few coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another.  “I really can’t afford any more,” she said.  “He can get his wheel mended with that, can’t he?”

“It is three times his fare,” Arnold said austerely, “and he deserved nothing—­but a fine, perhaps.”  The man was suppliant before them, cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open.  Hilda lifted her head and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink kite.  Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.

“Ah,” she said.  “Our deserts.”

It was the merest echo, and she had done it on purpose, but he could not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands, and turned and walked away with him, he was held in a frightened silence.  There was nothing perhaps that he wanted to talk of more than of his experience at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and explained; yet in that space of her two words the impossibility of mentioning it had sprung at him and overcome him.  He hoped, with instant fervour, that she would refrain from any allusion to The Offence of Galilee.  And for the time being she did refrain.  She said, instead, that her hand was smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would use a carbolic lotion?  Stephen, with a guarded look, said very possibly not, but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to disagreeable necessities; covered a preposterous impulse to cry with another smile.