“The Sahib walks!” said Ram Prasannad, who dusted the office books and papers, to Bundal Singh the messenger, who wore a long red coat with a badge of office, and went about the business of the Queen-Empress on his two lean brown legs. “What talk is that?” Bundal Singh shifted his betel quid to the other cheek and lunged upon his feet. This in itself was something. When one sits habitually upon one’s heels the process of getting up is not undertaken lightly. The men looked out together between the whitewashed stucco pillars of the long verandah that interposed between the Commissioner’s clerks and the glare and publicity of the outer world of Hassimabad. Overhead, in a “That signifies,” continued Ram Prasannad, without emotion, “news that is either very good or very bad. The Government lÂt had but arrived, the sahib opened one letter only—which is now with him—and in a breath he was gone, walking, though the horse was still fast between the shafts. Myself, I think the news is good, for my cousin—he is a writing baboo in the Home “I will go swiftly after with an umbrella, and from his countenance it will appear,” remarked Bundal Singh; “and look thou, worthy one, if that son of mud, Lal Beg, the grain dealer, comes again in my absence to try to make petition to the sahib, and brings a pice less than one rupee to me, do thou refuse him admission.” Bundal Singh ran after his master, as he said. As John Church walked rapidly, and the habitual pace of a Queen’s messenger in red and gold is a dignified walk, the umbrella was tendered with a devoted loss of wind. “It may be that your honour will take harm from the sun,” Bundal Singh suggested, with the privilege all the Commissioner’s people felt permitted to use. The Commissioner liked it—could be depended upon to appreciate any little savour of personal devotion to him, even if it took the form of a liberty. He had not a servant who was unaware of this or failed to presume “Simply it does not appear. The sahib’s forehead had twenty wrinkles, and his mind was a thousand miles hence. Yet it was as if he had lately smiled and would smile again. What will be, will be. Lal Beg has not been here?” John Church walked steadily on, with his near-sighted eyes fixed always upon the wide space of sunlit road, its red dust thick-printed with bare feet and hoofs, that lay in front of him—seeing nothing, literally, but the way home. He met no one who knew him except people from the bazar, who regarded their vizier with serious wonder as they salaamed, the men who sat upon low bamboo carts and urged, hand upon flank, the peaceful-eyed cattle yoked to them, turning to stare as they jogged indolently past. The lady, who sat at the other end of the room writing, rose as her husband came into it, and stepped forward softly to meet him. If you had known her you would have noticed a slight elation in her step that was not usual, and made it more graceful, if anything, than it commonly was. “I think I know what you have come to tell me,” she said. Her voice matched her personality so perfectly that it might have suggested “That Sir Griffiths Spence goes on eighteen months’ sick leave, and——” “And that you are appointed to officiate for him. Yes.” “Somebody has written?” “Yes—Mr. Ancram.” His wife had come close to him, and he noticed that she was holding out her hands in her impulse of congratulation. He took one of them—it was all he felt the occasion required—and shook it lamely. She dropped the other with a little quick turn of her head and a dash of amusement at her own expense in the gentle gravity of her expression. “Do sit down,” she said, almost as if he had been a visitor, “and tell me all about it.” She dragged a comfortable chair forward out of its relation with a Burmese “I must apologise for my boots,” he said, looking down: “I walked over. I am very dusty.” “What does it matter? You are King of Bengal!” “Acting King.” “It is the same thing—or it will be. Sir Griffiths retires altogether in two years—Lord Scansleigh evidently intends you to succeed him.” The lady spoke with obvious repression, but her gray eyes and the warm whiteness of her oval face seemed to have caught into themselves all the light and shadow of the room. “Perhaps—perhaps. You always invest in the future at a premium, Judith. I don’t intend to think about that.” Such an anticipation, based on his own worth, seemed to him unwarrantable, almost indecent. “I do,” she said, wilfully ignoring the clouding John Church blushed, through his beard “Ancram will be one of my secretaries,” he said. “Does he speak at all—does he mention the way it has been taken in Calcutta?” Mrs. Church went to her writing-table and came back with the letter. It was luxuriously written, in a rapid hand as full of curves and angles as a woman’s, and covered, from “Dear Lady” to “Always yours sincerely,” several broad-margined sheets. “I think he does,” she said, deliberately searching the pages. “Yes: ‘Church was not thought precisely in the running—you are so remote in Hassimabad, and his work has always been so unostentatious—and there was some surprise when the news came, but no cavil. It is known that the Viceroy has been looking almost with tears for a man who would be strong enough to redeem a few of Sir Griffiths’ mistakes if possible while he is away—he has been, as you know, ludicrously weak with the natives—and Church’s handling of that religious uproar you had a year ago has not been forgotten. I John Church listened with the look of putting his satisfaction under constraint. He listened in the official manner, as one who has many things to hear, with his head bent forward and toward his wife, and his eyes consideringly upon the floor. “I am glad of that,” he said nervously when she had finished—“I am glad of that. There is a great deal to be done in Bengal, and matters will be simplified if they recognise it.“ “I think you would find a great deal to do anywhere, John,” remarked Mrs. Church. It could almost be said that she spoke kindly, and a sensitive observer with a proper estimate of her husband might have found this irritating. During the little while that followed, however, as they talked, in the warmth of this unexpected gratification, of what his work had been as a Commissioner, and what it might be as a Lieutenant-Governor, it would have been evident “By the way,” said John Church, getting up to go, “when is Ancram to be married?” “I don’t know!” Mrs. Church threw some interest into the words. Her inflection said that she was surprised that she didn’t know. “He only mentions Miss Daye to call her a ‘study in femininity,’ which looks as if he might be submitting to a protracted process of education at her hands. Certainly not soon, I should think.” “Ancram must be close on forty, with good pay, good position, good prospects. He shouldn’t put it off any longer: a man has no business to grow old alone in this country. He deteriorates.” Church pulled himself together with a shake—he was a loose-hung creature—and put a nervous hand up to his necktie. Then he pulled down his cuffs, considered his hat with the “You might send me over something,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I won’t be able to come back to breakfast. Already I’ve lost three-quarters of an hour from work. Government doesn’t pay me for that. You are pleased, then?” he added, looking round at her in a half shamefaced way from the door. Mrs. Church had returned to the writing-table, and had again taken up her pen. She leaned back in her chair and lifted her delicate chin with a smile that had custom and patience in it. “Very pleased indeed,” she said; and he went away. The intelligent observer, again, would have wondered how he refrained from going back and kissing her. Perhaps the custom and the patience in her smile would have lent themselves to the explanation. At all events, he went away. He was forty-two, exactly double her age, when he married Judith Strange, eight years before, in Stoneborough, a small manufacturing John Church went back to work with his satisfaction sweetened by the fact that his wife had told him that she was very pleased indeed, while Mrs. Church answered the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram’s letter. “I have been making my own acquaintance this morning,” she said among other things, “as an ambitious woman. It is intoxicating, |