p of tea; and his talk, while he stayed, seemed to suffer less from
the limitations of his Order than it usually did. He was fluent and
direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more than his prayers; that
his glance at the world had still a speculation in it; and when he went
away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring
a vague inward corollary upon her day--

"It pays! It pays!"

CHAPTER V

Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday
night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"--he
sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the
hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9.30. Prices as
usual" with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In the
Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof and nobody could hear the orchestra
when it rained--the Midgets were presenting the earlier collaborations
of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine
years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full
blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great Occidental circus when
Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both staying at the
Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through
cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say
nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And
certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while
hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably
imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold
weather. There was the Mystic Bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a
pipal tree, which gave you by an arrangement of looking-glasses the
most unaccountable sensations for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know
Thyself!" where a physiological display lurked from the eyes of the
police behind a perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri
Chandra's Gully. Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition,
sighed to think how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the
Imperial Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape,
and pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that
rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought bitterly,
standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims of legitimate
drama, for th