“Mummie,” remarked Miss Daye, as she pushed on the fingers of a new pair of gloves in the drawing-room, “the conviction grows upon me that I shall never become Mrs. Ancram.”

“Rhoda, if you talk like that you will certainly bring on one of my headaches, and it will be the third in a fortnight that I’ll have to thank you for. Did I or did I not send home the order for your wedding dress by last mail?”

“You did, mummie. But you could always advertise it in the local papers, you know. Could you fasten this? ‘By Private Sale—A Wedding Dress originally intended for the Secretariat. Ivory Satin and Lace. Skirt thirty-nine inches, waist twenty-one. Warranted never been worn.’ Thanks so much!”

“Rhoda! you are capable of anything——”

“Of most things, mummie, I admit. But I begin to fear, not of that!”

“Are you going to break it off? There he is this minute! Don’t let him come in here, dear—he would know instantly that we had been discussing him. You have upset me so!”

“He shan’t.” Miss Daye walked to the door. “You are not to come any farther, my dear sir,” said she to the Honourable Mr. Ancram among the Japanese pots on the landing: “mummie’s going to have a headache, and doesn’t want you. I’m quite ready!” She stood for a moment in the doorway, her pretty shoulders making admirably correct lines, in a clinging grey skirt and silver braided zouave, that showed a charming glimpse of blue silk blouse underneath, buttoning her second glove. Ancram groaned within himself that he must have proposed to her because she was chic. Then she looked back. “Don’t worry, mummie. I’ll let you know within a fortnight. You won’t have to advertise it after all—you can countermand the order by telegraph!” Mrs. Daye, on the sofa, threw up her hands speechlessly, and her eyes when her daughter finally left the room were round with apprehension.

Ancram had come to take his betrothed for a drive in his dog-cart. It is a privilege Calcutta offers to people who are engaged: they are permitted to drive about together in dog-carts. The act has the binding force of a public confession. Mr. Ancram and Miss Daye had taken advantage of it in the beginning. By this time it would be more proper to say that they were taking refuge in it.

He had seen Mrs. Church several times since the evening on which he had put her into her carriage at the gates of Hastings House, and got into his own trap and driven home with a feeling which he analysed as purified but not resigned. She had been very quiet, very self-contained, apparently content to be gracious and effective in the gown of the occasion; but once or twice he fancied he saw a look of waiting, a gleam of expectancy, behind her eyes. It was this that encouraged him to ask her, at the first opportunity, whether she did not think he would be perfectly justified in bringing the thing to an end. She answered him, with an unalterable look, that she could not help him in that decision; and he brought away a sense that he had not obtained the support on which he had depended. This did not prevent him from arriving very definitely at the decision in question unaided. Nothing could be more obvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, was he morally at liberty, from the girl’s own point of view, to degrade her by a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If her affections had been involved in the remotest degree——but he shrugged his shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye’s affections. He wished to Heaven, like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, but she was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. The thing would require a little finessing; of course the rupture must come from her. There were things a man in his position had to be careful about. But with a direct suggestion——Nothing was more obvious than that she did not care for him. He would make her say so. After that, a direct suggestion would be simple—and wholly justifiable. These were Mr. Lewis Ancram’s reflections as he stood, hat in hand, on Mrs. Daye’s landing. They were less involved than usual, but in equations of personal responsibility Mr. Ancram liked a formula. By the intelligent manipulation of a formula one could so often eliminate the personal element and transfer the responsibility to the other side.

The beginning was not auspicious.

“Is that le dernier cri?” he asked, looking at her hat as she came lightly down the steps.

“Papa’s? Poor dear! yes. It was forty rupees, at Phelps’s. You’ll find me extravagant—but horribly!—especially in hats. I adore hats; they’re such conceptions, such ideas! I mean to insist upon a settlement in hats—three every season, in perpetuity.”

They were well into the street and half-way to Chowringhee before he found the remark, at which he forced himself to smile, that he supposed a time would arrive when her affections in millinery would transfer themselves to bonnets. The occasion was not propitious for suggestions based on emotional confessions. The broad roads that wind over the Maidan were full of gaiety and the definite facts of smart carriages and pretty bowing women. The sun caught the tops of the masts in the river, and twinkled there; it mellowed the pillars of the bathing-ghats, and was also reflected magnificently from the plate-glass mirrors with which Ram Das Mookerjee had adorned the sides of his barouche. A white patch a mile away resolved itself into a mass of black heads and draped bodies watching a cricket match. Mynas chattered by the wayside, stray notes of bugle practice came crisply over the walls of the Fort; there was an effect of cheerfulness even in the tinkle of the tram bells. If the scene had required any further touch of high spirits, it was supplied in the turn-out of the Maharajah of Thuginugger, who drove abroad in a purple velvet dressing gown, with pink outriders. Ancram had a fine susceptibility to atmospheric effect, and it bade him talk about the Maharajah of Thuginugger.

“That chap Ezra, the Simla diamond merchant, told me that he went with the Maharajah through his go-downs once. His Highness likes pearls. Ezra saw them standing about in bucketsful.”

“Common wooden buckets?”

“I believe so.”

“How satisfying! Tell me some more.”

“There isn’t any more. The rest was between Ezra and the Maharajah. I dare say there was a margin of profit somewhere. What queer weather they seem to be having at home!”

“It’s delicious to live in a place that hasn’t any weather—only a permanent fervency. I like this old Calcutta. It’s so wicked and so rich and so cheerful. People are born and burned and born and burned, and nothing in the world matters. Their nice little stone gods are so easy to please, too. A handful of rice, a few marigold chains, a goat or two: hardly any of them ask more than that. And the sun shines every day—on the just man who has offered up his goat, and on the unjust man who has eaten it instead.”

She sat up beside him, her slender figure swaying a little with the motion of the cart, and looked about her with a light in her grey eyes that seemed the reflection of her mood. He thought her chatter artificial; but it was genuine enough. She always felt more than her usual sense of irresponsibility with him in their afternoon drives. The world lay all about them and lightened their relation; he became, as a rule, the person who was driving, and she felt at liberty to become the person who was talking.

“There!” she exclaimed, as three or four coolie women filed, laughing, up to a couple of round stones under a pipal tree by the roadside, and took their brass lotas from their heads and carefully poured water over the stones. “Fancy one’s religious obligations summed up in a cooking-potful of Hughli water! Are those stones sacred?”

“I suppose so.”

“The author of ‘The Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,’” she suggested demurely, “should be quite sure. He should have left no stone unturned.”

She regarded him for a moment, and, observing his preoccupation, just perceptibly lifted her eyebrows. Then she went on: “But perhaps big round stones under pipal trees that like libations come in the second volume. When does the second volume appear?”

“Not until Sir Griffiths Spence comes out again and this lunatic goes back to Hassimabad, I fancy. I want an appropriation for some further researches first.”

The most enthusiastic of Mr. Ancram’s admirers acknowledged that he was not always discreet.

“And he won’t give it to you—this lunatic?”

“Not a pice.”

“Then,” she said, with a ripple of laughter, “he must be a fool!”

She was certainly irritating this afternoon. Ancram gave his Waler as smart a cut as he dared, and they dashed past Lord Napier, sitting on his intelligent charger in serious bronze to all eternity, and rounded the bend into the Strand. The brown river tore at its heaving buoys; the tide was racing out. The sun had dipped, and the tall ships lay in the after-glow in twos and threes and congeries along the bank, along the edge of Calcutta, until in the curving distance they became mere suggestions of one another and a twilight of tilted masts. Under their keels slipped great breadths of shining water. Against the glow on it a country-boat, with its unwieldy load of hay, looked like a floating barn. On the indistinct other side the only thing that asserted itself was a factory chimney. They talked of the eternal novelty of the river, and the eternal sameness of the people they met; and then he lapsed again.

Rhoda looked down at the bow of her slipper. “Have you got a headache?” she asked. The interrogation was one of cheerful docility.

“Thanks, no. I beg your pardon: I’m afraid I was inexcusably preoccupied.”

“Would it be indiscreet to ask what about? Don’t you want my opinion? I am longing to give you my opinion.”

“Your opinion would be valuable.”

Miss Daye again glanced down at her slipper. This time her pretty eyelashes shaded a ray of amused perception. “He thinks he can do it himself,” she remarked privately. “He is quite ready to give himself all the credit of getting out of it gracefully. The amount of flattery they demand for themselves, these Secretaries!”

“A premium on my opinion!” she said. “How delightful!”

Ancram turned the Waler sharply into the first road that led to the Casuerina Avenue. The Casuerina Avenue is almost always poetic, and might be imagined to lend itself very effectively, after sunset, to the funeral of a sentiment which Mr. Ancram was fond of describing to himself as still-born. The girl beside him noted the slenderness of his foot and the excellent cut of his grey tweed trousers. Her eyes dwelt upon the nervously vigorous way he handled the reins, and her glance of light bright inquiry ascertained a vertical line between his eyebrows. It was the line that accompanied the Honourable Mr. Ancram’s Bills in Council, and it indicated a disinclination to compromise. Miss Daye, fully apprehending its significance, regarded him with an interest that might almost be described as affectionate. She said to herself that he would bungle. She was rather sorry for him. And he did.

“I should be glad of your opinion of our relation,” he said—which was very crude.

“I think it is charming. I was never more interested in my life!” she declared frankly, bringing her lips together in the pretty composure with which she usually told the vague little lie of her satisfaction with life.

“Does that sum up your idea of—of the possibilities of our situation?” He felt that he was doing better.

“Oh no! There are endless possibilities in our situation—mostly stupid ones. But it is a most agreeable actuality.”

“I wish,” he said desperately, “that you would tell me just what the actuality means to you.”

They were in the Avenue row, and the Waler had been allowed to drop into a walk. The after-glow still lingered in the soft green duskiness over their heads; there was light enough for an old woman to see to pick up the fallen spines in the grass; the nearest tank, darkling in the gathering gloom of the Maidan, had not yet given up his splash of red from over the river. He looked at her intently, and her eyes dropped to the thoughtful consideration of the crone who picked up spines. It might have been that she blushed, or it might have been some effect of the after-glow. Ancram inclined to the latter view, but his judgment could not be said to be impartial.

“Dear Lewis!” she answered softly, “how very difficult that would be!”

In the sudden silence that followed, the new creaking of the Waler’s harness was perceptible. Ancram assured himself hotly that this was simple indecency, but it was a difficult thing to say. He was still guarding against the fatality of irritation when Rhoda added daintily:

“But I don’t see why you should have a monopoly of catechising. Tell me, sir—I’ve wanted to know for ever so long—what was the first, the very first thing you saw in me to fall in love with?”