under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy; with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete novelties for the same evening.  It made a cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy, there was something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan posters against the crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their shoes.  Talking of Hilda they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a testimony to the difference of her.  In Alicia’s smile there was a satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of things.

The life of the market, the bazar, was all awake and moving.  They rolled up through a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the moment and abandoned, where the leisurely crowd with calculation under its turbans, swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a palm-dealer ran out of bounds and made a little grove before the stall of the man who sold pith helmets.  The warm air held the smell of all sorts of commodities; there was a great hum of small transactions, clink of small profits.  “It makes one feel immensely practical and acquisitive,” Duff said, looking at the loaded baskets on the coolies’ heads; and he insisted on getting out.  “I am dying to buy an enormous number of desirable things very cheap.  But not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you, nor any ribbons or lace—­ is that good lace, Miss Livingstone?  Nor even a live duck—­really I am difficult.  We might inquire the price of the duck though.”

The sense of being contributive to his holiday satisfaction reigned in her.  She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that played steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him without her sanction, how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being.  They made their way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so many things he wanted to stop before as they went, leaning on his stick to examine them and delighting in opportunities for making himself quite ridiculous.  The country tobacco-dealer laughed too, squatting behind his basket—­it was a mad sahib, but not madder than the rest; and there was no hurry.  Alicia saw the pink glow of the roses beyond, where the sun struck across them over the shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach them by degrees.  They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of climax to the hour’s experience, and after that she was not entirely sure that the day would be as grey as other days.

This was the flood-time of roses, and it was exquisite in the flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and squares of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones.  Some of the stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was room only for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the velvety Jacks, the rest over-ran the tables and the floor in anything that would hold them.