“It sounds most unusual,” Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest was rather obviously curbed.
“It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one doesn't go round the corner.”
There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss Livingstone's desire to be informed.
Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and waited. The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.
“And I regret to say it was I who introduced them,” she said.
“Introduced whom?”
“Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,” Hilda went on tranquilly, “because I would only lend it to her while she was there.”
“Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is always grateful to be amused.”
“Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather intense about it. And—I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's account. Did I say so?” They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia's crude blush—everything else about her was so perfectly worked out—cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. “Perhaps though,” Hilda hurried on with a pang, “we generalise too much about the men.”
What Miss Livingstone would have found to say—she had certainly no generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay—had not a servant brought her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider. The card saved her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then exclaimed, “My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend—a Clarke Mission priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our cigarettes?”