ing smile
with that, looking over her shoulder in one of her most effective
hesitations, one hand holding back the portiere.

"And next week?" cried Alicia.

"Oh, next week we do _L'Amourette de Giselle_--Frank Golding's re-vamp.
Good-bye! Good-bye!"

"I wonder very much what Patullo has done with _The Offence of
Galilee_," Arnold said, after she had gone.

"Come and see, Stephen. We have a box, and there will be heaps of room.
It's--suitable, isn't it?"

"Oh, quite."

"Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on. Why not?"

"Thanks, very much indeed. It is sure to reward one. I think I shall be
able to give myself that pleasure."

Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed, became
a cup of tea; and his talk, while he staid, 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 bowe