think it must be because she's such a confoundedly good fellow."

Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a
shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was over; she was
full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.

"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said. "But why are you going? Don't
go. Stay and have another cup of tea."




CHAPTER III.


The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same terms
at New College, and now found themselves again together in the social
poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their
walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in
Bentinck street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why any one
should be walking there, to begin with, any one, at all events, not a
Chinaman or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture or an
able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets,
and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest
glass of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled
person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a Japanese smile, who no longer
possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen represented the
whole port. The cramped, twisting thoroughfare was full of people like
this; they overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the
left and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings