Ancram’s first letter had miscarried, a peon in the service of the Sirkar having abstracted the stamps; and Philip Doyle, when he received the second, was for the moment overwhelmed with inferences from his correspondent’s silence regarding the marriage, which should have been imminent when he wrote. Doyle glanced rapidly through another Calcutta letter that arrived with Ancram’s for possible news; but the brief sensation of Miss Daye’s broken engagement had expired long before it was written, and it contained no reference to the affair. The theory of a postponement suggested itself irresistibly; and he spent an absorbed and motionless twenty minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, while his pipe went out in his hand, looking fixedly at the floor of his room in the hotel, and engaged in constructing the tissue of circumstances which would make such a thing likely. If he did not grow consciously lighter-hearted with this occupation, at least he turned, at the end of it, to re-peruse his letters, as if they had brought him good news. He read them both carefully again, and opened the newspaper that came with the second. It was a copy of the _Bengal Free Press_, and his friend of the High Court had called his special attention to its leading article, as the most caustic and effective attack upon the College Grants Notification which had yet appeared. Mr. Justice Shears wrote:— /# “As you will see, there is abundant intrinsic evidence that no native wrote it. My own idea, which I share with a good many people, is that it came from the pen of the Director of Education, which is as facile as it would very naturally be hostile. Let me know #/ /# what you think. Ancram is non-committal, but he talks of Government’s prosecuting the paper, which looks as if the article had already done harm.” #/ Doyle went through the editorial with interest that increased as his eye travelled down the column. He smiled as he read; it was certainly a telling and a forcible presentation of the case against His Honour’s policy, adorned with gibes that were more damaging than its argument. Suddenly he stopped, with a puzzled look, and read the last part of a sentence once again:— /# “But he has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders.” #/