away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring
a vague inward corollary upon her day--

"It pays! It pays!"



CHAPTER V


Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday
night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"--he
sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the
hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9.30. Prices as
usual" with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In the
Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof and nobody could hear the orchestra
when it rained--the Midgets were presenting the earlier collaborations
of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine
years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full
blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great Occidental circus when
Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both staying at the
Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through
cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say
nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And
certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while
hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably
imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold
weather. There was the Mystic Bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a
pipal tree, which gave you by an arrangement of looking-glasses the