Lindsay considered.  “Thanks,” he said, “I’ll come at about seven—­if you are sure you won’t be too exhausted to have me after such a day.”

He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly reddened at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta’s road dust, and a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which she said matter-of-factly, “We are never too exhausted to attend to our Master’s business.”

Lindsay’s face expressed an instant’s hesitation, he looked gravely the other way.  “And the address?” he said.

“Almost next door—­we all live within bugle-call.  The entrance is in Crooked lane.  Anybody will tell you.”

At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting.  Arnold said “Thanks” again and passed out—­she seemed to be holding it for him—­and picked his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite.  From there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked lane, where the entrance was.  It gave him a sense that she had her part in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make her thinkable and attainable.  Then he went to his room at the club and found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in advance, to say that she had not expected him.  “Friendly creature!” he said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that already there was one who guessed, who knew.

One gropes in Crooked lane after the lights of Bentinck street have done all that can be expected of them.  There are various things to avoid, washer-men’s donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar.  Lindsay, when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was positively dark.  He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner.  It was up there, he said, that the “tamasho-mems"[2] lived.  There were three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold’s trivial coin, and one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho—­it was finished.  Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to avoid collision with a heavy body descending.  He inquired Miss Filbert’s whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar, disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord.  At all events, he had the information.  Lindsay was to keep straight on; it was the third story, “and a lovelie airie flat, too, sir, for this part of the town.”  Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution and just missed treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John’s.  At the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the side of a passage.  The partition in which the door was came considerably short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile pattern.  Lindsay dared no further, but lifted up his voice in the Indian way to summon a servant. “Qui hai!"[3] he called; “Qui hai!”