She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman, and followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who hardly lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to look at her—­so many memsahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle gave prominence came to see the manager-sahib and they were so much alike.  At all events they carried a passport to indifference in the fact that they all wanted something, and it was clear to the meanest intelligence that they appeared to be more magnificent than they were, visions in dazzling complexions and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-class ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts.  It was less interesting still when they belonged to the other class, the shabby ladies, nearly always in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court, or sons before the police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible, “kept out of the paper.”  Successful or not, these always wept on their way out, and nothing could be more depressing.  The only gleam of entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of a boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local columns of the Chronicle—­a lady who had never known what a bailiff looked like in the lifetime of her first husband, or her second either.  Then at the sound of a pudgy blow upon a table or high abusive accents in the rapid, elaborate cadences of the domiciled East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would glance at Gobind Babu with a careful smile, for the manager-sahib who dispensed so much galli[6] was now receiving the same, and defenceless.

[Footnote 6:  Abuse.]

The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in.  He did not rise—­he was one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee exports in such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and she had come on business.  He gave her a nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table.  He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd.  Tapping the table with his blue pencil, he asked Miss Howe how the world was using her.

“Let me see,” said Hilda, a trifle absent-mindedly, “were you here last cold weather—­I rather imagine you were, weren’t you?”

“I was; I had the pleasure of—­”

“To be sure.  You got the place in December, when that poor fellow Baker died.  Baker was a country-bred, I know, but he always kept his contracts, while you got your polish in Glesca, and your name is Macphairson—­isn’t it?”

“I was never in Glasscow in my life, and my name is Macandrew,” said the manager, putting with some aggressiveness a paper-weight on a pile of bills.

“Never mind,” said Hilda, again wrapped in thought, “don’t apologise—­it’s near enough.  Well, Mr. Macandrew”—­her tone came to a point—­“what is the Stanhope Company’s advertisement worth a month to the Chronicle?”