"Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and there was no time for
remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.

"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portière.

Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of
the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It
reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully. Arnold
walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her
to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless it.

"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee." He flavoured what he
said, and made it pretty, like a woman. "Let me confess at once, that is
what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality and
self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee time, isn't it?" Then he
turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the
luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been to
him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a
little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical
attitudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she
could hardly have expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with
upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his
self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet
that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all
as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she
decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and
Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to
tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would
represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their