"Then you may go away," Arnold said. They were standing at the crossing of the wide red road from which they would go in different directions. She saw that the question was momentous to him. She also saw how curiously the sun sallowed him and how many more hollows he had in his face than most people. She had a pathetic impression of the figure he made, in his dusty gown and shoes. "God's wayfarer," she murmured.
"Come too," she said aloud. "Come and be a Clarke Brother where the climatic conditions suit you better. The world wants Clarke Brothers everywhere."
He looked at her and tried to smile, but his lips quivered. He opened them in an effort to speak, gave it up, and turned away silently, lifting his hat. Hilda watched him for an instant as he went. His figure took strange proportions through the tears in her eyes, and she marvelled at the lightness with which she had touched, had almost revealed, her heart's desire.
CHAPTER XXIX.
"I knew it would happen in the end," Hilda said, "and it has happened. The Archdeacon has asked me to tea."
She was speaking to Alicia Livingstone in the dormitory, changing at the same time for a "turn" at the hospital. It was six o'clock in the afternoon. Alicia's landau stood at the door of the Baker Institution. She had come to find that Miss Howe was just going on duty and could not be taken for a drive.
"When?" asked Alicia, staring out of the window at the crows in a tamarind tree.
"Last Saturday. He said he had promised some friends of his the pleasure of meeting me. They had besieged him, he said, and they were his best friends, on all his committees."
"Only ladies?" The crows, with a shriek of defiance at nothing in particular, having flown away, Miss Livingstone transferred her attention.