twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened
lips had the immobility of the bazaar. People looked at their playbills
to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed
from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his
foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a
keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed
the applause, as it does with the children at a pantomime.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly
so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun to
use her arts upon Pilate in the well-known scene about which the
newspapers reported long afterwards how the Pope had declared that if
Miss Howe had not been a Protestant and so impervious he would have
excommunicated her--and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed
to afford him a better place. He put an undecided hand upon a prop of
the box that rose behind Alicia's shoulder, and so stood leaning and
looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder-cape
of the frock of his Order than he knew. Hilda, in one of those
impenetrable regards which she threw straight in front of her while
Pilate yawned and posed nearer and nearer the desire of the Magdalene to
be admitted to his household, was at once aware of him. Presently he sat
down again--it was still the profane, the fabulous, the horrible
Patullo, but a strain of pure gold had come into the fabric worth
holding in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon. Far enough
it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible,
almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction. She
dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful, huddled Eastern
fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to