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usual auction of such effects held soon after a ship put into port. The inhabitants of Calcutta, so the officer informed us, more wealthy than particular, were always anxious to buy anything that could be said to have been ‘brought out from Home’. In any case, we did not expect ever to make such a long voyage again, since Mr Roberts (who had himself used the service on his journey to England) advised us to return by the overland route through the Red Sea and thence from Alexandria to Constantinople by dray which took no more than two months if one used the East India Company’s new fleet of steam packets plying between Bombay and Suez.
    I had left the door of my cabin ajar while I packed, in order to catch the least movement of air, and as I was looking around for almost the last time, making sure I had forgotten nothing and with a feeling oddly akin to nostalgia, Elvira Wilkins sidled in and asked in her apologetic, breathless way if I would mind going to her mama for a moment, since she wished to thank me for my kindness during the voyage. This was the last thing I wanted, but of course I had to comply.
    Mrs Wilkins, dressed in a gown of purple satin, and with a dolman of the same satin trimmed with jet beads and bugles hung carefully on a chair beside her, was sitting bolt upright on her bed, cooling her fat red face with a palm-leaf fan. Her hair, freshly dyed in henna, was of a startling orange, and Elvira had arranged it in almost the latest style—for a young girl. Elvira herself, though I guessed she was several years older than me, wore a gown of limp white muslin with blue bows at the hemline and forget-me-nots round the neck. Her sparse straw-coloured hair was screwed into a mass of small curls, but the damp heat was already destroying the effect of the tongs.
    The purple dolman was removed and I was asked to take a seat on the chair, facing Mrs Wilkins.
    ‘You must forgive me for asking you to come in here,’ she commenced. ‘I know I am intruding on your time, but Elvira and me wanted to thank you special for all you have done for us, and we thought it would be better done in private.’
    I made polite noises and hoped I did not look as uncomfortable as I felt.
    ‘You have been very good to my poor Elvira and me, Miss Hewitt, in spite of not caring for us,’ she added almost shyly, and then as I made to deny this assertion, held up her hand and silenced me, laughing good-naturedly. ‘No, no! No apologies! We are all what the good Lord made us! You are what you are, we are what we are, and I don’t suppose the Almighty ever intended us to be bosom friends. We don’t deny, Elvira and me, that we would like to be counted as your friends, but we can well see that maybe you would wish otherwise. Now if the Major, my husband, had been with us, maybe you would have thought higher of us. He’s a proper gentleman, my husband, with book-learning at his fingertips just like you and that Mr Roberts. He can talk about politics and that just like the best of ’em, even if he did start life in the Band. Brains, you see! That’s what he has—brains! And it’s brains that makes the difference in life, even more than birth and money. As he always says to me, “What’s the use of a high place in life to a man who hasn’t the sense to make use of it?” ’
    ‘Oh, absolutely!’ I murmured. ‘I certainly wish I could have met Major Wilkins.’
    ‘Well, perhaps you will, perhaps you will. I heard Mr Flood say that you was all hoping to be in Lucknow by the cold weather, and, if that’s so, then perhaps we shall see you, as the Major is stationed for the moment not far outside the city, and no doubt we will have to be in Lucknow for some of the coldweather functions y’know— levées and banquets and that, that has to be attended by anyone in the Major’s position. When a man has to make his way, he can’t afford to neglect such engagements, however much he prefers his own hearth and home, and the Major is