warm bloom of her cheek, a perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth.  So they passed in streets of the thronging people, where yards of new-dyed cotton, purple and yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, golden-tongued Kali, half visible through the door of a mud hut—­where all the dealers in brass dishes and glass armlets and silver-gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference.  So they passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.

They talked of the accident.  “You stopped the horses, didn’t you?” Hilda said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal robes worn every day.

“I told them to stop, poor things,” Arnold said; “they had hardly to be persuaded.”

“But you didn’t save my life or anything like that, did you?” she adventured like a vagrant in the sun.  The blood was warm in her.  She did not weigh her words.  “I shouldn’t like having my life saved.  The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—­I shouldn’t know how to cope with it.”

“I will claim to have saved your other hand,” he smiled.  “You will be quite grateful enough for that.”

She noted that he did not hasten, behind blushes, into the shelter of a general disavowal.  The cassock seemed to cover an obligation to acknowledge things.

“I see,” she said, veering round.  “You are quite right to circumscribe me.  There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out.  It is only the absence of it, too plainly expressed, that is unpleasant.  But you won’t find that in me either.”  She gave him a smile as she lowered her parasol to turn into the shop of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell European drugs, that promised infinite possibilities of friendship; and, he, following, took pleased and careful possession of it.

An hour later, as they approached Number Three, Lal Behari’s Lane, Miss Howe looked pale, which is not surprising since they had walked and talked all the way.  Their talk was a little strenuous too; it was as if they had fallen upon an opportunity, and, mutually, consciously made the most of it.

“You must have some tea immediately,” Arnold said, before the battered urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.

“A little whisky and soda, I think.  And you will come up, please, and have some too.  You must.”

“Thanks,” he said, looking at his watch.  “If I do—­”

“You’ll have the soda without the whisky!  All right!” she laughed, and led the way.

“This is vicious indulgence,” Arnold said of his beverage, sitting under the inverted Japanese umbrellas.  “I haven’t been pitched out of a ticca-gharry.”