He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a question.  On what day precisely?  And how long?  And afterwards?  The yellow dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road trended the other way, to keep her eyes upon it.  There was an endless going round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a tree, and another tree; some of them had flowers on them.  When he broke the silence afterwards she started as if in apprehension, but it was only to say something that anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged.  Her assent was little and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it.  The Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton, without a suggestive bone.

Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded thought, “I had so little to make me think she cared.”  There was in it that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his invalid’s privileges as if he valued them.  He lay extended beside her among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.

“She told me it was not for your life she had been praying—­only that if you died you might be saved first.”  Her eyes were still on his hand, and she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse.  Then they relaxed again, and he said, “Oh, well,” and smiled at the balancings of a crow drinking at a city conduit.

That was all.  Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to postpone her impressions, even her emotions.  In the meantime it was something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to talk about the commonplaces of the roadside.  In her escape from this oppression, she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent pleasure in what they saw; everything had in some way the likeness of the leafing teak-trees, tender and curative.  In the broad early light that lay over the tanks there was a vague allurement, almost a presage, and the wide spaces of the Maidan made room for hope.  She asked Lindsay presently if he would mind driving to the market; she wanted some flowers for that night.  I think she wanted some flowers for that hour.  Her thought broke so easily into the symbol of a rose.

They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink and crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared houses servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches in the sun and were shaved.  Where the street ran into shops there was still a shuttered blankness, but here and there a doorkeeper yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah.  The first hoarding in a side street announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady Macbeth,