theory lacked so little to approve it—­only technical corroboration.  It might also be considered that, although Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for intercessional or any other purpose, she did not come again.  They may have heard in Crooked Lane that Duff was better.  We may freely imagine that Mrs. Sand was informed; it looked as if the respite to disinterested anxiety afforded by his recovery had been taken advantage of.  Lindsay was to be given time for more dignified repentance; they might now very well hand him over, Alicia thought, smiling, to the Archdeacon.

As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make, was perhaps lacking in essentials.  It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it might very probably work out in shades.  So much would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda’s theory might very well be lost in contingencies.  Nevertheless, Alicia postponed her story, from day to day and from hour to hour.  If her ideas about it—­she kept them carefully in solution—­could have been precipitated, they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her brother the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.

She told him finally on the morning of his first drive.  They went together and alone, Alicia taking her brother’s place in the carriage at a demand for him from the hospital.  It was seven o’clock, and the morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river.  There was a white light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and delicately purple to the west.  The dust slept on the broad roads of the Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel of a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the streets that knotted themselves in the city.  From the river, curving past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country people with baskets on their heads.  The sun struck a vivid note with the red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse.  There was the completest freedom in the wide tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that might rebel in prison.  The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must have been aware of it, though as a matter of fact when she finally told Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden Gardens, where the yellow dome of the post-office swelled against the morning sky; and so lost it.