Mohendra’s eyes were moist—with gratification. He was still trying to express it when he withdrew, ten minutes later, backing toward the door. Ancram shut it upon him somewhat brusquely, and sent a servant for a whisky-and-soda. It could not be said that he was in the least nervous, but he was depressed. It always depressed him to be compelled to take up an attitude which did not invite criticism from every point of view. His present attitude had one aspect in which he was compelled to see himself driving a nail into the acting Lieutenant-Governor’s political coffin. Ancram would have much preferred to see all the nails driven in without the necessity for his personal assistance. His reflections excluded Judith Church as completely as if the matter were no concern of hers. He considered her separately. The strengthening of the bond between them was a pleasure which had detached itself from all the other interests of his life; he thought of it tenderly, but the tenderness was rather for his sentimental property in her than for her in any material sense. She stood, with the dear treasure of her sympathy, apart from the Calcutta world, and as far apart from John Church as from the rest. That evening, at dinner, Ancram told Philip Doyle and another man that he had been drawing Mohendra Lall Chuckerbutty on the University College question, and he was convinced that feeling was running very high. “The fellow had the cheek to boast about the row they were going to make,” said Mr. Ancram. CHAPTER VIII. Philip Doyle did not know at all how it was that he found himself at the Maharajah of Pattore’s garden-party. He had not the honour of knowing the Maharajah of Pattore—his invitation was one of the many amiabilities which he declared he owed to his distinguished connection with the Bengal Secretariat in the person of Lewis Ancram. Certainly Ancram had asked him to accept, and take his, Ancram’s, apologies to the Maharajah; but that seemed no particular reason why he should be there. The fact was, Doyle assured himself, as he bowled along through the rice-fields of the suburbs to His Highness’s garden-house—the fact was, he was restless, he needed change supremely, and anything out of the common round had its value. Things in Calcutta had begun to wear an unusually hard and irritating look; he felt his eye for the delinquencies of human nature growing keener and more critical. This state of things, taken in connection with the possession of an undoubted sense of humour, Doyle recognised to be grave. He told himself that, although he was unaware of anything actually physically wrong, the effects of the climate were most insidious, and he made it a subject of congratulation that his passage was taken in the _Oriental_.