“Glory to His name! 
      Glory to His name!”

Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn’t, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

His “Good-evening!” when the meeting was over, was a cheerful, general salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the response he got, equally general and equally cheerful.  Lieutenant Da Cruz’s smile was even further significant, if he had thought of interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

“Wait for me,” Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate appeal, as they moved off.

“I guess you’ve got company to see you home,” Mrs. Sand called out, and they did not wait.  As Lindsay came closer the East Indian paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and slipped away.

“The Ensign knows she oughtn’t to talk like that,” Laura said.  Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and seemed perturbed.

“What she said was quite true,” he ventured.

“But—­anybody would think—­”

“What would anybody think?  Shall we keep to this side of the road?  It’s quieter.  What would anybody think?”

“Oh, silly things.”  Laura threw up her head with a half laugh.  “Things I needn’t mention.”

Lindsay was silent for an instant.  Then “Between us?” he asked, and she nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty.  He found her hand and drew it through his arm.  “Would you mind so very much,” he said, “if those silly things were true?” He spoke as if to a child.  His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her.  “I would give all I possess to have it so,” he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.

“I don’t believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay.”  Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm.  He seemed to be a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious entanglement.  It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.  Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.