Hilda's
lambent observation was everywhere but most of all on him; a fleck of
the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a
perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets
of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the
pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half
visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and
silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line
upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference. So they
passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity who shapes our ends.
They talked of the accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?" Hilda
said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to
which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal
robes worn every day.
"I told them to stop, poor things," Arnold said; "they had hardly to be
persuaded."
"But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?" she
adventured; like a vagrant in the sun.
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