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!”