Laura shook her head.  “Faith is better than disinfectants.  I never get any harm.  My Master protects me.”

“My goodness!” Hilda said.  And in the silence that occurred, Captain Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid for was a decayed tooth.  Presently Alicia made a great effort.  She laid hands on Hilda’s previous reference as a tangibility that remained with her.

“Do you ever go to the Cathedral?” she said.

The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert’s features, as when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant from a flower.  Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries of dogma it may have been some other obscurity, but that was the effect.

“No.  I never go there.  We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a tabernacle to ourselves.”

“Isn’t it exquisite—­her way of speaking!” cried Hilda from the bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible.  But she went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus.

“Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary enough,” she said; “a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us.  The Army is His Army, He is Lord of our hosts.”

“A kind of chant,” murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism.  Then that impression was carried away as it were on a puff of air, and it is hardly likely that she thought of it again.

“I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?” Laura said.  The sanctity of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue of some other thing.  Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine, and narrowed her eyes.

“Dear me, yes,” she said for Alicia.  “His Excellency the Viceroy and all his beautiful A.D.C.’s, no end of military and their ladies, Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under-Secretaries so thick they’re kept in the vestibule till the bells stop.  ’And make Thy chosen people joyful’!” she intoned.  “Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit.”

“You know already what a humbug she is,” Alicia said, but Captain Filbert’s inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.

“Well, it wouldn’t be any attraction for me,” she said, rising to go through the little accustomed function of her departure.  “I’ll be going now, I think.  Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to take her place at the Believers’ Meeting.”  She took Hilda’s hand in hers and held it for an instant.  “Good-bye, and God bless you—­ in the way you most need,” she said, and turned to Alicia, “Good-bye.  I am glad to know that we will be one in the glad