Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when
she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.
"Ah," she said. "Our deserts."
It was the merest echo and she had done it on purpose, but he could not
know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands and
turned and walked away with him, he had nothing to say. There was
nothing, perhaps, that he wanted to talk of more than of his experience
at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and explained; yet in
that space of her two words the impossibility of mentioning it had
sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant fervour, that she
would refrain from any allusion to _The Offence of Galilee_. And for the
time being she did refrain. She said, instead, that her hand was
smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the chemist would use
a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look, said very possibly not
but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of the far-off day when the
little girl of her was brought tactfully to disagreeable necessities,
covered a preposterous impulse to cry with another smile.
A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his arms
full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery.
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