Padre; and then came George, looking very fussy and as if he knew he did not go twice a day to church, or that there was ever any dancing in Government House, and then the Bishop and his chaplains and the Archdeacon; and I was not half awake, and Chance began to bark, and a little motherless mouse-deer I am bringing up by hand was asleep on the sofa. In short we never were less prepared for a dignitary who thinks much of ceremonies. However, I did my best—shook myself straight, gave Chance a gentle kick, tried to give ‘La Fleur des Pois,’ by Balzac, a botanical air, sat carelessly down on the mouse-deer, and conversed with considerable freedom, slightly checked by artful attempts to fish out from under the Bishop’s chair my sash with the buckle attached, which had assumed a serpentine attitude of much grace in full sight. ‘Je suis une figure affreuse, j’en suis sûre,’ I thought to myself with a pang of remembrance of your voice. But the Bishop was much too full of his own sufferings to mind it. He had been twenty days in a steamer coming down from Allahabad and was nearly baked, and he drove straight to Government House on landing. I
