The carriage drew up on one side of the stately width of Chowringhee. That is putting it foolishly; for Chowringhee has only one side to draw up at—the other is a footpath bordering the great green Maidan, which stretches on across to the river’s edge, and is fringed with masts from Portsmouth and Halifax and Ispahan. When the sun goes down behind them——But the sun had not gone down when Mrs. Church got out of her carriage and went up the steps of the School of Art: it was still burnishing the red bricks of that somewhat insignificant building, and lying in yellow sheets over the vast stucco bulk of the Indian Museum on one side, and playing among the tree-tops in the garden of the Commissioner of Police on the other. Anglo-Indian aspirations, in their wholly subordinate, artistic form, were gathered together in an exhibition here, and here John Church, who was inspecting a gaol at the other end of Calcutta, had promised to meet his wife at five o’clock. The Lieutenant-Governor had been looking forward to this: it was so seldom, he said, that he found an opportunity of combining a duty and a pleasure. Judith Church remembered other Art Exhibitions she had seen in India, and thought that one category was enough. At the farther end of the room a native gentleman stood transfixed with admiration before a portrait of himself by his own son. Two or three ladies with catalogues darted hurriedly, like humming-birds, from water-colour to water-colour. A cadaverous planter from the Terai, who turned out sixty thousand pounds of good tea and six yards of bad pictures annually, talked with conviction to an assenting broker with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, about the points of his “Sunset View of Kinchinjunga,” that hung among the oils on the other wall. There was no one else in the room but Mr. Lewis Ancram, who wore a straw hat and an air of non-expectancy, and looked a sophisticated twenty-five. For a moment, although John Church was the soul of punctuality, it did not seem remarkable to Mrs. Church that her husband had failed to turn up. Ancram had begun to explain, indeed, before it occurred to her to ask; and this, when she remembered it, brought a delicate flush to her cheeks which stayed there, and suggested to the Chief Secretary the pleasant recollection of a certain dewy little translucent flower that grew among the Himalayan mosses very high up. “It was a matter His Honour thought really required looking into—clear evidence, you know, that the cholera was actually being communicated inside the gaol—and when I offered to bring his apologies on to you I honestly believe he was delighted to secure another hour of investigation.” “John works atrociously hard,” she replied; and when he weighed this afterward, as he had begun to weigh the things she said, he found in it appreciably more concern for John’s regrettable habit of working atrociously hard than vexation at his failure to keep their engagement.