to be out of it, avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a glance at the boiled milk preparations of the butler.  “And you know,” said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, “how these people have to be watched.”  To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy.  There was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone’s conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple about her right to take care of her guest, such a right dwindling curiously when it has been given in the highest to somebody else.  These pangs and penalties may have visited her in their proportion, but they did not take the importance of motives.  She rather stood aside with folded hands, and in an infinite terror of prejudicing fate, devoured her heart by way of keeping its beating normal.  Perhaps, too, she had a vision of a final alternative to Lindsay’s marriage, one can imagine her forcing herself to look at it.

Remove herself as she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing Lindsay’s room, for her own lay beyond it.  In the seven o’clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep.  “Ayah!” she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert’s face.  Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible movement in the direction of her skirts.  She stood silent, stricken in the dusk with astonishment, but the sense that was strongest in her was plainly that of having made a criminal discovery.  Laura stumbled upon her feet, and the two faced each other for an instant, words held from them equally by the authority of the sickroom door.  Then Alicia beckoned as imperiously as if the other had in fact been the servant she took her for, and Laura followed to where, farther on, a bedroom door stood open, which presently closed upon them both.  It was a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony crucifix over the bed.  Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet-table.  Across the open window a couple of bars of sunset glowed red and gold, and a tall palm of the garden cut all its fronds sharply against the light.

“Well?” said Alicia, when the door was shut.

Captain Filbert put out a deprecating hand.

“I intended to ask if you had any objection, miss, but you had gone out.  And the nurse was in the room; I couldn’t get to her.  There was nobody but the servants about.”

“Objection to what?”

“To my being there.  I came to pray for Mr. Lindsay.”

“Did you make any noise?”