As she pulled up her pony in front of the bungalow a man came down the steps of the verandah and helped her to dismount.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Chunerbutty,” she exclaimed, “and good morning.”

“Good morning, Miss Daleham.  Just back from your ride with Fred, I suppose?”

The newcomer was the engineer of the estate.  The staff of the tea-garden of Malpura consisted of three persons, the manager, a hard-drinking old Welshman called Parry; the assistant manager, Daleham; and this man.  As a rule the employees of these estates are Europeans.  Chunerbutty was an exception.  A Bengali Brahmin by birth, the son of a minor official in the service of a petty rajah of Eastern Bengal, he had chosen engineering instead of medicine or law, the two professions that appeal most to his compatriots.  A certain amount of native money was invested in the company that owned the Malpura garden; and the directors apparently thought it good policy to employ an Indian on it.

Like many other young Hindus who have studied in England, Chunerbutty professed to be completely Anglicised.  In the presence of Europeans he sneered at the customs, beliefs, and religions of his fellow-countrymen and posed as an agnostic.  It galled him that Englishmen in India thought none the more of him for foreswearing his native land, and he contrasted bitterly their manner to him with the reception that he had met with in the circles in which he moved in England.  He had been regarded as a hero in London boarding-houses.  His well-cut features and dark complexion had played havoc with the affections of shop-girls of a certain class and that debased type of young Englishwoman whose perverted and unnatural taste leads her to admire coloured men.

In one of these boarding-houses he had met Daleham, when the latter was a clerk in the city.  It was at Chunerbutty’s suggestion and with an introduction from him that Fred had sought for and obtained employment in the tea company, and as a result the young Englishman had ever since felt in the Bengali’s debt.  He inspired his sister with the same belief, and in consequence Noreen always endeavoured to show her gratitude to Chunerbutty by frank friendliness.  They had all three sailed to India in the same ship, and on the voyage she had resented what seemed to her the illiberal prejudice of other English ladies on board to the Hindu.  And all the more since she had an uncomfortable suspicion that deep down in her heart she shared their feeling.  So she tried to seem the friendlier to Chunerbutty.

It said much for her own and her brother’s popularity with the planters that their intimacy with him did not cause them to be disliked.  These men as a class are not unjust to natives, but intimate acquaintance with the Bengali does not tend to make them love him.  For the Dalehams’ sake most of the men in the district received Chunerbutty with courtesy.  But his manager, a rough Welshman of the bad old school, who openly declared that he “loathed all niggers,” treated him with invariable rudeness.