It may very well be that she regretted her behaviour in this respect, for it was eventually after one of these parties that Surgeon-Major Livingstone, pressing upon his departing guest in the hall the usual whisky and soda, found it necessary instead to give him another kind of support, and to put him immediately and authoritatively to bed.  Lindsay was very well content to submit; he confessed to fever off and on for four or five days past, and while the world went round the pivotal staircase, as Dr. Livingstone gave him an elbows up, he was indistinctly convinced that the house of a friend was better than a shelf at the club.

The next evening’s meeting saw his place empty under the window of the hall in Crooked Lane, noticeably for the first time in weeks of these exercises.  The world shrank, for Laura, to the compass of the kerosene lamps; there was no gaze from its wider sphere against which she must key herself to indifference.  When on the second and third evening she was equally undisturbed, it was borne in upon her that either she or Mr. Arnold, or both, had prevailed, and she offered up thanks.  On the fourth she reflected recurrently and anxiously that it was not after all a very glorious victory if the devil had carried off the wounded; if Lindsay, after all the opportunities that had been his, should slip back without profit to the level from which she had striven—­they had all striven—­to lift him.  Mrs. Sand, not satisfied to be buffeted by such speculations, sent a four-anna bit to the head bearer at the club on her own account and obtained information.

Alicia saw no immediate privilege in the complication, though the circumstances taken together did present a vulgar opportunity which Mrs. Barberry came for hours to take advantage of.  There were the usual two nurses as well as Mrs. Barberry; Alicia could take the Arab farther afield than ever, and she did.  One can imagine her cantering fast and far with a sense of conscious possession in spite of Mrs. Barberry and the two nurses.  There may be a certain solace in the definite and continuous knowledge available about a person hovering on the brink of enteric under your own roof-tree.  It was as grave as that; Surgeon-Major Livingstone could not make up his mind.  Alicia knew only of this uncertainty; other satisfactions were reserved for the nurses and Mrs. Barberry.  She could see that her brother was anxious, he was so uniformly cheerful, so brisk and fresh and good-tempered coming from Lindsay’s room in the morning, to say at breakfast that the temperature was the same, hadn’t budged a point, must manage to get it down somehow in the next twenty-four hours, and forthwith to envelop himself in the newspapers.  Those arbitrary and obstinate figures, which stood for apprehension to the most casual ear, stamped themselves on most things as the day wore on, and at tea-time Mrs. Barberry gave her other details, thinking her rather cold in the reception of them.  But she plainly preferred