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 hs whom he had fought in the alley for the loss, but a short examination told him that, indirectly, it was the ancient blade which had played thief. Putting it back, he must have rammed it down too hard; it had bitten through the thin, threadbare velvet sheath, had made a neat slit in the pocket lining, and the money had dropped through.

Not for a second did he consider asking his father for assistance. Not for a second did he give up his plan of going to Calcutta by the first steamer.

“If I can't go first class,” he said to himself, “I'll go steerage—Asiatic steerage if I have to.”

And then, with that dry, rather grim humor, typically English in its way, disconcerting, incongruous, bobbing up in moments of emotional stress, acting as a safety valve as it were:

“You stole my money,” addressing the blade which flickered ironically beneath the lamp-light, “and now you are going to pay for it—and serve you jolly well right!”

He weighed it in his hand, and, continuing his soliloquy:

“I have been told that there's nothing you can't buy or sell in London, for the right price, from the Ko-hi-noor to a paper of Yankee chewing gum. Very well. Let's see if there's a market for thieving, dishonest Oriental blades!”

He had no other valuables. His watch was a simple silver half-hunter; and the few shillings in his trousers were just about enough to pay for his room and perhaps a drink. He decided that he needed that drink right now, and went down to the old-fashioned saloon

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 bar with its two or three dozen oaken, strong-backed chairs that stood round against the farther wall, each fitted with its genial occupant—cab drivers and small tradesmen of the vicinity; the black settle where the pompous landlord presided and gave his opinion on politics, cricket, and the lamentable shortcomings of the County Council; the neat, sanded floor; the small, round window high up on the wall, with a wheel ventilator in one of the panes.

“A mug of bitters,” he called to the bar maid, sat down, and picked up a copy of the Times which a former occupant of the chair had left.

Idly he turned to the second page. Square in its center was a large advertisement printed in heavy, extravagant Gothic type. He read, read again, sat up straight, tore off the page, crammed it in his pocket, and rose.

“I say!” he shouted excitedly to the bar maid. “Never mind that mug of bitters!”—and he picked up his hat and ran out of the saloon bar, the hotel, and away across Soho Square as fast as his legs would let him, while the landlord looked after him, open-eyed, open-mouthed.

“I don't know wot this 'ere young generytion is comin' to,” he said, disapprovingly, to his neighbor, Tom Jenks, the glazier. “Well—never mind—Lloyd George, as I was a-sayin' of just now, will ruin England as sure as …”

Hector, meanwhile, had come to a stop beneath a lamp post that squinted down on the oozy London pavement with a yellow, arrogant eye.

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He took the advertisement from his pocket and read it over again.

It was short and to the point:

“Open for business day and night thought Hector. "Well—it seems that Mr. Ali Yusuf Khan is as anxious to buy them as I am to sell this particular one.”

He caught a green bus, dropped off at Drury Lane, and turned into Coal Yard Street, that ancient, crooked alley still fragrant with memories of Nell Gwynne and, too, with the names rather less ambrosial, of Jack Sheppard and the Round House.

It was deserted but for a mangy, guilty looking tomcat, and the nearest lamp post was at the corner of Drury Lane. But a full, golden moon was in the western heaven, and Hector Wade found Number 356 without trouble, in the middle of a packed, greasy mob of low, sixteenth-century houses that rose sheer from the pavement, with leaded windows protruding like bastions, with wrought-iron scrapers and yawning cellar hatches and overhanging, buttressed angles of walls that in the course of time had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.

A flickering, neurotic gas jet lit up a fly-specked display window. But there were no swords nor daggers of any sort; only a large square of pasteboard which echoed the newspaper advertisement:

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 Hector pulled the frayed rope. Came a brushing of feet on a rug inside, and the door of the shop sprang open to disclose a very old, very tall, white-bearded Oriental who peered from beneath bushy brows with shrewd, patient eyes.

“Be pleased to enter, saheb,“ he said, in halting English and a slurring, foreign accent.

Hector smiled.

India? Asia?

Why! It began here, in the gray heart of London! And so he dropped into gliding Hindustani, the language which his Behari nurse had taught him and which he had never forgotten.

“Apanan duari,” he said, the words coming smoothly, evenly, without the trace of an accent, “kukoro hariyar, ya sheik!”

Ali Yusuf Khan smiled in return. But he shook his head.

“No, no!” he continued in his halting English. “I am no—ah—Hindu. I speak—Persian.”

“So do I!” rejoined Hector in the latter language; and the other, with sudden excitement, took him by the arm and pulled him across the threshold into the shop that lay beneath a fretted Damascan brass lamp in a mass of delicate purple and heliotrope shadows.

“Good, by Allah!” he exclaimed. “I am an old and very stupid camel. I cannot twist my withered tongue around the language of the foreigners.”

He waited courteously till Hector had taken a seat.

Then, anxiously:

“You have come to—buy a blade, sword or dagger or yataghan?”

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“No. I have come to sell …” and, with English directness, pulling the ancient weapon from his pocket, “this!”

Ali Yusuf Khan picked up the blade and looked at it. At once a tremor ran through his body. His hand shook as if with palsy. But he controlled himself, went to the corner of the shop, lit another lamp, and examined the dagger minutely.

Finally he turned.

“You—” he asked, staring straight at Hector, “you say you want to sell—this?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?”

Hector flared up.

“Look here,” he said, “if you're trying to insinuate that I came by it through dishonest means …”

“No, no.” Ali Yusuf Khan was stern, domineering. “Answer me, saheb. Where did you get it?”

“Well—if you must know—it has always been in my family's possession.”

“Always?”

“For centuries. My father told me once that one of my ancestors brought it with him from Asia hundreds of years ago.”

“You—you know nothing else about this weapon—a legend? Perhaps a tradition?”

“No.” Hector was getting impatient. “Look here—I didn't come here to be cross-examined. I saw your advertisement, accepted it in good faith, and …”

"Why do you want to sell it?” cut in the other.

“Why?” Hector laughed, shortly, disagreeably. “

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 You're inquisitive, aren't you? But—all right—I'll tell you. I want to sell it because I need money, because I am through with England, with my family, with—oh—everything! Because I want to go to Calcutta, to Asia, on the first ship. Now—tell me—how much money will you give me for it?”

“I shall not buy it!”

“You—you mean to say …”

“Wait! But I shall lend you money on it.”

“How much?”

And then Ali Yusuf Khan's answer, soft, low:

“As much as you want, saheb. A hundred guineas! A thousand! Ten thousand! It is for you to say!”

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later, when The Honorable Hector Wade spoke of that period of his eventful life, he would add, by way of ruminating, psychological commentary, that the home-spun self-possession in which he considered Ali Yusuf Khan's offer was really the strangest part of the whole incident.

“You musn't [sic] forget," he would add, “that I carried a chip on my shoulder and was as quick to smell offense as a mouse smells cheese. The whole sordid, miserable affair was only a few days old, and I hadn't been in London more than seven or eight hours. But you know how it is, how you don't meet people when you want to meet them, and how they seem to pop out of the nowhere when you want to avoid them. There was—what was her name? Oh, yes, Victoria de Bunsen, girl I used to dance with, and, of course, I ran into Vic at Waterloo Station. She was with Jamie Black of the Highland Light Infantry, a sort of second cousin of mine, and both cut me dead, sent me to Coventry, greeted me with an emphatic chorus of unfeigned, contemptuous silence.

“And, on the train up from Sussex, I had seen a copy of Reynolds' Weekly. They had stuck my picture

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 on the front page with a border all round of cards and dice and diaphanously dressed chorus girls and a jolly old headline about 'Younger Son of Earl of Dealle Implicated in Disgraceful Card Scandal.' I fancy you can imagine the rest. So I was rather thin-skinned. —how's that for Latin? Everything touched me on the raw, and I was more afraid of people's pity than of their contempt. You can sidestep contempt by shutting up. But pity … Why, it leaves you helpless.

“And then Ali Yusuf Khan's offer. As much money as I wanted, and yet it did not seem like charity. It seemed perfectly proper, and sort of on the cards, you see, preordained. Kismet, and all that, that at a moment's notice, at midnight, a few doors from Drury Lane, a mysterious incarnation out of the Arabian Nights whom I had never seen before should offer to lend me an exorbitant sum on a dusty old sword whose blade and hilt was inlaid with a blurred gold pattern. Rum, don't you think?”

“As much as you want, saheb,” repeated the old man. “It is for you to say.”

Hector was about to suggest fifty pounds, the amount that had dropped from his pocket, when he had a sudden revulsion of feeling. He took the blade from the other's hand.

“No!” he said, steadfastly. “Come what may, I shall not part with this. It would be like parting with …” he slurred and stopped; blushed slightly.

“Like parting with a piece of your soul?” the Asian gently suggested.

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Hector inclined his head.

“Yes,” he said. “It would be like giving up something that I have waited for … through the centuries …”

He stood there, staring into the fretwork of delicate purple and heliotrope shadows that cloaked the room like a silken veil.

In the corner was a pedestal of ebony and nacre which supported a great Persian incense bowl. Heavy smoke clouds floated and twisted about like a vaporous, gigantic furnace of opal colors wreathing up to the ceiling, with a hot, honey-sweet scent of lilies and lotus buds and sandalwood, and it seemed to Hector as if he were on the borderland of dim, half-forgotten things, on the frontier of a new life—new, yet, somehow, subconsciously remembered—which was remote, not in years nor in distance, but in codified, standardized principles of civilization, from the life, the personal experiences, the very physical and psychical reactions he had known heretofore; as if the ancient blade that was throbbing in his hand were a pointing the way to a Life of To-morrow beside which his Life of Yesterday and To-day faded to a wretched, meaningless dream.

It was like a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm his mind, his sober, prosy, saving British commonsense and prejudices. … And then, out of the trooping shadows where Ali Yusuf Khan had squatted down on a heap of pillows, came the words, in gentle, purring Persian:

“Take the money, saheb, and keep the blade. No, no, no!” as Hector, recalled to earth, was about to

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 flare up. “You must forget your petty, withering pride. Go where your heart calls you. Follow the feet of your soul … out there! to Asia!”

And he rose, crossed the shop, drew up the window blind with an impatient gesture, and pointed to where already the moon was growing fainter and fainter and paling into the drab cosmos of the London morning and where, low in the eastern heaven, between the ragged cleft of Drury Lane, the sun was rising like a ball of somber, crumpled rose-pink.

Then, as if the sordid glimpse of London had broken the spell, he added:

“I am not altogether unselfish. You see, saheb, I am an Asian, and Asia is old and worn and tired. It needs fresh, strong blood. It needs men like yourself. We do not need the sahebs who simply go there to make money and who return to their own country to spend it. We need men who are willing to be one with us—unhappy men to whom their own country denies a chance. Here! Call it a loan!”

He drew a purse filled with sovereigns from the voluminous folds of his waist shawl and gave it to Hector, who weighed it in his palm and laughed, rather disagreeably.

“All right,” he said. “I agree to the bargain. But I give you fair warning you'll lose by it. I thought of going to India even before I read your advertisement. But—sober second thoughts …” he shrugged his shoulders. “It's really useless, you know. India is only an imperial suburb after all. It's just around the corner from Belgravia and Bond Street and Marlborough House. I—oh—I am mixed up in

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 a scandal over here, and every scandal that reeks in the London Westend stinks to heaven by the time it reaches Calcutta and some deputy assistant commissioner's mother-in-law's ear—and tongue. I have not the fluttering ghost of a chance in India.”

“India is not the only land East of Suez,” the other rejoined gently.

“I know. But it is the only part of Asia where I would fit in. I was born there, and my people have lived for generations between the Himalayas and Cape Comorin. I know all sorts of people there, in the army, the civil service, and, of course, they'll give me the cold shoulder as their brethren do in England—not that I can blame them for it. But what's the use? I have half a mind to go West, to Canada, instead of East, and so …”

He was about to toss the purse on the low taboret, when Ali Yusuf Khan stopped him with a stiff, wooden gesture and a show of flaming passion.

“I thought you were a gentleman—an English gentleman!”

“I am!” quickly, boyishly.

“Then live up to your bargain. You took the money. Now you must go.”

“But don't you understand? I don't want to bore you with the whole, long, mean story of the particular scandal in which I am mixed up. Wouldn't interest you anyway. Only—I tell you I haven't a chance over there.”

“You have something else!”

“What?”

“The blade!” Ali Yusuf Khan's words came out

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 with a tremendous, cold enthusiasm. “The blade!” he repeated, in a hushed, flat voice.

He picked the weapon up and pressed it to his lips.

“The blade will never fail you, saheb,” he went on, “though men will and women may. Its soul is old—old and wise and strong and just a little cruel—and loyal, for it came out of Asia. The rest … man and woman—your friends? What do they matter? For you know the ancient Persian saying: 'Let none confide in the sea, nor in whatever has horns or claws, or who carries deadly weapons; neither in a king, nor in a woman, nor in a priest.' But this blade you can trust!”

“Hm … it has played me one dirty trick already,” Hector smiled grimly, reminiscently. “It cut through my pocket and lost me my money.”

The other, too, smiled.

“Not the blade, saheb, but the sheath. The sheath is old and tired, like Asia, like my own country. And so we will give the sword a new house in which to throb and pulse and weave mighty spells.”

For several minutes he rummaged in a carved sandalwood box, finally drawing out a jewel-studded shagreen scabbard into which, slowly, carefully, with his back to his visitor, he fitted the weapon.

“Here, saheb. Never draw the blade in sport, nor in a wrong cause. But trust it. It will speak to you when man fails you—or Fate!”

He said it with a certain note of finality; and Hector muttered clumsy words of thanks and walked out into the gray, haggard London morning.

The great beast of a city was already stirring its

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 steel-and-concrete limbs with the dull rubbing of tackle and rope and crate, the symphony of more tongues than Babel ever knew of. Trucks and buses rumbled past. Trolley cars shot in all directions, clanking and shrieking. Trumpeting automobiles whirred by with gleaming brasses. An odor rose from the pavement as of sweat and blood and singed shoe leather—the odor of hectic, neurotic, ever hustling Europe—

And, over to the southeast, were the Docks—the wash and heave of the outer sea—India—Asia …

Hector hailed the first taxicab.

“To the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship office,” he directed.

“A bit early, guv'nor, ain't you? Them city chaps don't open shop until they 'ad their nine o'clock nip of ”

“That's all right.” A wave of glorious impatience was surging through Hector's soul. “I shall wait outside the steamship office. At least I'll imagine that I can smell India there.”

“Right-oh, guv'nor,” said the impassive driver; then, to himself: “Bloomin' rum go, I calls it. Smell—India! What the …”

And “bloomin' rum go” were the words which Sergeant Horatio Pinker of the metropolitan police was just then whispering into his martial black mustache as, passing through Coal Yard Street, he saw a light in Ali Yusuf Khan's shop, found the door blinds drawn up, and looked in, as the city regulations and his private curiosity prescribed.

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“I don't think the old josser's exactly a crook,” he reported to Police Captain Hodges half an hour later. “But—my word! He fair gave me the creeps. Standing there with his arms above his head like—like—oh—one of them red plush monkeys on a stick we used to play with when we was kids—and his whole body swinging to and fro—and the expression on his face! Looking straight at me he was, but never saw me, no, sir! Looked through me, that's what he did. And then—well”—Sergeant Pinker coughed, and continued a little diffidently, like a man who knows that his word is going to be doubted—“he goes somewhere in the back of his shop, and I hears a snick and a twirl as if he was opening a safe, and back he comes and round his scrawny old neck he wears a necklace with about fifty diamonds each as big as my thumb-nail … and I knows twinklers! I knows when they're glass and when they ain't. I used to walk the Bond Street beat, sir, and I tell you them pieces of ice is worth a cool hundred thousand pound sterling and … No, sir!” indignantly, “I signed the Good Templar's pledge over three years back. No! I had nothing all morning except a cup of that hog wash Harry Snooks sells over at his stand near Drury Lane and calls it coffee—blast his eyes! Well—to go back to that Oriental josser—a jolly rum go, that's what it is …”

“Well, sergeant, keep an eye on him.”

“Yes, sir.”

And that night, sipping his stone ginger at his favorite tavern, the Running Footman near Berkeley Square, he spoke about it to his friend Jimmy Hawden,

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 reporter—though he was still youthful and unsophisticated enough to call himself special writer—of the Daily Chronicle who in turn, dropping in at Dolly's Chop House for a bite, an hour later, mentioned it to a sandy-haired gentleman—who whistled and snapped his fingers.

Meanwhile, had Sergeant Horatio Pinker transplanted his astral body via the Magic Carpet route a matter of a few thousand miles east and looked, like the Devil in Madrid, through the bulbous, painted dome of the palace at Tamerlanistan, he would have seen the Princess Aziza Nurmahal facing a clamorous, mutinous, sneering mob of courtiers and soldiers and palace officials grouped, respectively, about the black-robed, fur-capped figure of Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, and Tagi Khan, Master of Horse, resplendent in peach-colored trousers, loose, crimson, silver-embroidered coat, and voluminous turban of cloth-of-gold, with Koom Khan, the commander-in-chief, playing the role of sardonic, mischief-making middleman. From group to group he shifted, with soft words and soft gestures, and he left behind him a spluttering, minatory trail of discontent.

The princess was pale, frightened, nervous. A sob rose to her lips, and the governor of the eastern marches pointed a rude, derisive thumb.

“A well is not to be filled with dewdrops,” he said in a stage whisper, “nor is a turbulent land to be ruled by a woman's tears.”

“As soon drag for the moon reflected in the water,”

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 chimed in his twin brother, governor of the western marches, stroking his scarlet beard.

“As soon lift a hand to catch Time,” Koom Khan suggested, unsmilingly.

And then laughter, while the princess turned appealingly to Ayesha Zemzem, the shriveled old nurse, whom she had raised to the rank of Zil-i-Sultana, “Shadow of the Queen.”

“Ayesha,” she said, rising, “I am sick of all this leaky-tongued clacking and twaddling and babbling. Thou art regent. Do thou tell them that, in this as in all other matters, I have decided to follow in the foot-steps of my dead father until Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh, returns from the far places.”

“Thou art wrong, piece of my soul,” the hill woman rejoined bluntly.

“Wrong? Thou sayest that … even thou?”

Resolutely, Ayesha inclined her head.

“I love thee, little soul,” she said. “I would make my heart a floor cloth for thy white feet. But—I have thought over the matter since last we had speech with that dog of a Babu, and to-day I tell thee that thou art wrong.”

“Ayesha!” exclaimed the princess, the hot tears welling again in her eyes.

“Wrong and unwise!” stolidly repeated the other, amidst an excited chorus of assent. “Tamerlanistan is poor—and money is money.”

“Right!” agreed Gulabian, surprised as well as pleased that here was a new, and powerful, adherent of the cause of foreign “concessions.” “Money is indeed money!”

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“Money is on the lips of the liar,” cried Aziza Nurmahal, while the Sheik-ul-Islam murmured piously, clicking the wooden beads of his rosary, that money is an infidel sect and the pavement on the bitter, jagged road to damnation.

“Money is a most evil stench in the nostrils of man kind,” he added, with a Moslem's unblushing hypocrisy, “but it is sweet ambergris when handled by a wise and good priest, familiar with the lessons of the Koran.” He coughed, rather self-consciously, as he caught Koom Khan's stony eye.

The princess leaned forward. Her left hand clutched the scepter of the Gengizkhani, while her right was about the hilt of the straight, simple sword that had rested across the knees of the dead Ameer during the funeral procession, and the soul of the naked steel seemed to reach out and touch her own soul, to sluice it with an ancient and crunching energy.

“Right or wrong,” she said, “I have decided. I do not want to grant concessions. I do not want the money of the foreigners without the advice of the Itizad el-Dowleh. It is wicked money—money that fills our ears with the raucous clamor of strife …”

“Speaking about ears,” sententiously from the Armenian, “it has been said that a hungry belly has no ears.”

“Right,” said the governor of the eastern marches; “without money, I am a rogue; with money, I am God.”

“Thou art always a rogue—with money, or without,” gently opined his twin brother.

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“And thou hast pig's ears,” came the civil rejoinder, while Koom Khan, to keep the assembly from degenerating into an unseemly brawl and perhaps the swishing of swords, rose, gathered eyes like a hostess, and walked straight up to the peacock throne.

“Aziza Nurmahal,” he said, with drawling, slow arrogance, “statecraft waits on facts, a mere hand-maiden, and does not invent them; and the fact is that we, the princes and nobles and soldiers of Tamerlanistan, have decided in full durbar that our land needs the money and wisdom and energy of the sahebs. The Babu Bansi has made a fair offer …

“Indeed!” cried the Armenian to whom, that very morning, Bansi, who had returned from Teheran, had given a certified check on the Anglo-Persian Bank for a goodly number of rupees, signed “Preserved Higgins”; while Tagi Khan, the leader of the other faction, boomed out that the Babu Chandra's offer was every bit as fair.

Koom Khan shrugged his massive shoulders.

“It makes no difference to me,” he went on, “to which of the two Babus thou grantest the concession …”

“Right!” chimed in the nurse who, though opposed to the princess' steadfast refusal of opening the land to European exploitation, had nowise lost her dislike for the courtiers nor learned to bridle her tongue. “Right, by Allah! Either Babu will well grease thy thieving hand.”

“Peace, O noseless one!” from Koom Khan; then, to the princess: “It seems that thy path is clear. For we have decided.”

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“We?” echoed Aziza Nurmahal.

She flared up. Her nostrils quivered. A light like a slow-eddying flame came into her black eyes.

A woman she was, young, tender, unable to cope with the tortuous, shifting undercurrents of palace and bazaar and mosque; not yet weaned from the silken, scented harem peace; alone. But in her veins raced the stormy, conquering blood of the Gengizkhani, the descendants of that Genghiz Khan who, the son of a rough Central Asian shepherd, clouted an empire together with brain and brawn; and, abruptly, her flaming pride of race burnt away the soft dross of her youth.

“I am the ruler of this land,” she said, in a voice as dry and keen as a new-ground sword. “My word is law. My gesture is a code. My whim is a decree. No decision shall be made about the matter of the concessions until the return of the Itizad el-Dowleh. Such is my command.”

“Thy—command?” Koom Khan guffawed. “And how then wilt thou enforce thy—command?”

“Thus,” cried Aziza Nurmahal.

And, with utter, dramatic suddenness, she jerked out the ancient, straight sword, and brought it down on the wrist of the commander-in-chief.

“Allah! Allah!” Koom Khan screamed in pain.

Blood squirted like a thick, crimson whip. He fell, fainting, to the ground.

Came silence; silence that bloated like a balloon of evil anticipations, while the crowd rose, like one man, shifted forward, intense, venomous, holding its breath like a beast of prey about to pounce and tear …

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 and while something like a tremendous lassitude swept over Aziza.

She stared at them.

Knowing the Orient by right of birth and race, she realized that her psychological moment had arrived.

Now or never! Mastery or death! There lay her choice, her chance.

So she jerked her wandering, trembling mind back into the control of her senses. She held herself erect and motionless except for her right arm which grasped the dripping blade.

“I am the ruler of this land,” she said again; and there was in her soft, low voice an enormous, metallic resonance, the ring of utter conviction.

“Thus shall I enforce my commands—thus—and thus—and thus!”

And, tightly pressing her lips together, her heart writhing in revolt at her own unwomanly brutality, she stepped down from the peacock throne and dealt blow after blow with her sword, right, left, indiscriminately, pricking, slashing, cutting, wounding …

And the reaction on the mob was instantaneous, and typical.

For these men were Asians; men inherently callous; men devoid of that weakening outgrowth of the imagination which the Occident calls sympathy; men in whom ruthlessness and cruelty excite a certain kind of admiration as a conspicuous and unmistakable exhibition of energy.

“By the red pig's bristles!” cried the governor of the eastern marches, as he tied a handkerchief about

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 his bleeding left arm. “A true daughter of the dead Ameer!”

“Brood of the spotted tiger's brood!”

“A real Gengizkhani, by Allah and by Allah!”

“Her father was the sickle, and she is the hoe!”

“Admirable!”

The last from the Sheik-ul-Islam who was rubbing an ear that the sword had nicked, and Gulabian, who had hid behind Tagi Khan's broad back, stepped forward and kowtowed low; the others followed suit, and again Aziza Nurmahal seized the psychological moment.

“We understand each other—now!” she said, and a smile ran from lip to lip, a smile of admiration, this time, of affection even. “There will be no granting of concessions until the return of Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh. Nor will there be discussing, nor criticizing, nor wondering, nor speculating. Is that understood?”

“Listen is obey, O sultana!” came the groveling chorus.

“Good!”

She turned to the nurse.

“Since thou dost not agree with me in the matter of the concessions, and since thou art too old to be beaten and since I love thee too dearly to give thee the point of the sword when it is red, I shall send thee back to the harem, where thou belongest. Thou art no longer regent—no longer the Shadow of the Queen. But thou shalt live out thy life in the shadow of the queen's affection.”

By this time, Gulabian, the Armenian, had regained the insolent, wheedling resiliency of his race.

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“If thou shouldst need another regent in place of Ayesha Zemzem,” he suggested, “then I …”

“I have already thought of that,” replied the princess. “Step forth, Wahab al-Shaitan!”

And a shiver of apprehension ran through the crowd, while from a far corner of the hall where he had stood a motionless onlooker, dressed in motley black and scarlet, his immense hands crossed on the hilt of his beheading ax, the executioner, a gigantic, plum-colored negro, stalked forward with a sinister majesty of movement.

“Wahab al-Shaitan,” continued the princess, “thou art regent until further orders. Rawan-i-Sultana, 'Killer for the Queen,' shall be thy honorable title. Thy motto shall be: 'Do not trust the living; do not fear the dead.' And thy ax shall be thy staff and seal of office.”

Then, abruptly:

“The audience is ended, nobles and gentles.”

An immediate consequence of Aziza Nurmahal's sudden assertion was that the Babu Chandra, local manager of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, decided suddenly that his head would be more safely on his shoulders if he delivered the cablegram which, addressed to the princess, had arrived that morning from London and which, at first, he had felt inclined to suppress—not because he understood the cryptic wording, but for the sake of general principles.

It was dated from London, bore no signature, and said:

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 ""

The princess was alone in a tower room of the palace when she opened the message and read it.

“The ancient prophecy she murmured. “The ancient prophecy of the Gengizkhani!”

And as she stepped to the window and looked south toward India, where, under the sweep of the twilight, the bunched mass of the town reddened to russet, then chilled to flat, silvery gray, while, in the office of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, at the corner of the Nahassim Street, Chandra's busy brown fingers were clicking a message to a gentleman from New York, temporarily at the Savoy, London.

“Wahab al-Shaitan,” said Aziza Nurmahal to the regent-executioner, “as soon as my preparations are made, I shall go south, to Calcutta. Rule thou the land in my absence, and—if thou shouldst not know what to do—consult thy beheading ax. And the rest shall be as Allah willeth!”

“My dear,” said Mr. Ezra W. Warburton to his daughter, “I have to go to Calcutta, and thence up into Central Asia on business. Would you like to come with me?”

“You just bet, you dear old dad!”

And she gave him a hug and a large, moist kiss.

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accomplished things less by keeping abreast of opportunity in the matter of enterprise, by a cunning and algebraic reckoning and dovetailing of the slightest details and chances as was the business secret of his rival, Mr. Preserved Higgins, than by an innate, sudden perceptiveness that was almost genius—would have been classified as genius had he been an artist instead of a financier.

Thus, just as soon as he had read Chandra's cablegram which quoted the one Aziza Nurmahal had received from London in toto and added the distressing information that the princess had finally had her way, that there was going to be no more talk of “concessions” until her father's prime minister, who had gone on a mysterious errand, had returned, he had decided to proceed to Tamerlanistan forthwith.

He had no idea what he should do after he got there. Too, he knew from former experiences that Mr. Preserved Higgins, in spite of his extravagant and blasphemous verbosity, was not given to bluffing, to empty boasting, when it came to business; and there was the wire which the Londoner had sent him to his New York office and which had been cabled on to the Savoy:

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 Mr. Warburton told himself that, in the tug-of-war about the Tamerlanistan “concessions,” he had lost out on two counts: the princess' decision and his rival's shrewdness, and—he added in his thoughts—perhaps the former was only a cloak for the latter; perhaps Aziza Nurmahal and the Cockney were working hand-in-hand.

And it was then that his congenital pettiness came into the focus. He would fight Mr. Preserved Higgins to the last trench. Doubtless, his own chance to make enormous investments in Tamerlanistan and to reap correspondingly large profits was gone. But at least he might be able to make success, if not impossible, then harder for the other, and there, in Mr. Warburton's philosophy of life and business—interchangeable terms—was a point gained. Too, it was in this that he differed fundamentally from the real builder, the real pioneer, who works and constructs and massively clouts together for the glory, the zest, the bully splendor of the thing, and not for his personal, despicable glory and profit.

He was like a small boy who has eaten his fill, and who, rather than push his plate across the table to his younger brother, decides to finish his ice cream to the last, painful spoonful.

Yes. At least he would be on the spot ready to watch his chance for mischief; and so he had made sure at once, over the telephone, that Mr. Preserved

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 Higgins had not booked on the P. & O. liner Kashmere which left for Calcutta the following morning, and that there would be no other sailing for the next ten days.

His decision to ask his daughter to come with him had also been made on the spur of the moment.

His wife had died when Jane was a young child, and father and daughter had always been very close. He was very proud of her. He admired her clean, audacious self-reliance, but, too, parentlike, was a little afraid of it.

Thus when Hector, following Mr. Preserved Higgins' exposure, had left the room, and when Jane had turned to him with a flat “I don't believe it. The man is innocent!” his heart had given a bound, for he knew from former experiences her sweeping, uncompromising fashion of taking the part of the underdog. Heretofore, the occasion had usually been with some underfed slum child or some underpaid servant, and had been easily and satisfactorily settled with the help of check book and fountain pen. But this time it was a man, a good-looking and youthful male with romantic eyes, who had flashed a romantic Oriental blade.

“Damn!” Mr. Warburton had said to himself.

Then, in a loud voice, and with an entirely false note of cheerful off-handedness:

“Ridiculous, my dear. The young fellow owned up to it himself.”

“And yet I know he's innocent, dad!”

“How do you know, Jane?”

“Because!”

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“A woman's reason, my dear.”

“And the very, very bestest reason in the world. I just—know it!”

“But …” an ejaculation, typically, malely irascible.

“But—nothing, dad! Nobody with eyes like his can possibly be guilty of such a mean thing as cheating at cards. And then—remember how he used his blade, dad!” she had added with serene, unblushing inconsequence.

He had begun to think of speeches, very firm, explicit, and didactic speeches, he would make, pointing out to her that London, all Europe in fact, was full of fortune hunters, that he was an immensely wealthy man and she a famous heiress, that perhaps Hector Wade had staged the fight near St. Katherine so as to meet her in a picturesque setting.

But, knowing her stubbornness, her sense of absolute independence, he had thought that it would be better to let well enough alone, and had satisfied himself with a grumbled “I had an idea that, with all your social experiences, here and in New York and in Paris, you'd have more sense than to fall for that sort of …” he had come near saying “bunk,” but had recovered in time and had said “thing!”

The choice of words had been unfortunate.

Jane had made a rash reply, and by the end of the scene—for it had degenerated into a scene—for the first time in their lives they had felt conscious of a certain antagonism toward each other. It had been as sudden as it had been unexpected.

And it had hurt—both.

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Then had come Babu Chandra's telegram; and—“distance and a change of milieu is the best palliative in the world,” had been his paternally cynical thought. In the golden romance of far Asia she would forget the romance her girlish heart had woven about “that card-cheating adventurer,” as he called him.

Therefore his invitation to come along with him.

Therefore, too, her warm, moist kiss.

Therefore, finally, Jane smiling impishly at a large bouquet of silvery Guelder roses that had come, that very morning, accompanied by a note which was typically English, both in its shy, clumsy self-consciousness and its unexpected, direct outspokenness, saying amongst other things:

The signature was:

Thus, Mr. Ezra W. Warburton was doubly shocked, when, having nursed his mal de mer in his cabin during the first few days of the journey, as was his habit, just as the Kashmere was sticking her dainty nose into the green swirl of the Bay of Biscay, and after he had decided that the world was not so bad when all was said and done and that he would be able to do with a cup of beef broth, a dry biscuit, and a glass

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 of port, passing by a large Anglo-Indian lady with spats, an abortive mustache, big feet, and a tailor-made manner, he heard her say to her companion:

“Such a jolly little girl that—what's her name?—oh, yes!—Warburton. And, would you believe it, my dear, she pals up with that bounder of a Wade!”

“You mean that Dragoon chap who …”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Good Heavens! You know, they shouldn't allow chaps like Wade to go to India. Wretched for the morale of the natives. But, with the Liberals in power, what can you …”

The financier did not wait to hear the end of the sentence. He forgot all about broth and biscuit and port.

“Have you by any chance seen my daughter?” he asked the steward in a positively dramatic manner.

“Yes, sir. I saw her on top deck two minutes back. Thank you, sir.”

And it was in the snug shadow of a life-boat that the irate father came upon his daughter, side by side with Hector Wade.

“Good—morning!” he said, with a strong accent on the “good” and a smile curling his thin lips.

But his daughter knew of old that this altogether, too consummate endeavor after genial ease was nothing except a cloak for a smoldering rage that might break at any moment.

It was she herself, therefore, who fired the first shot.

“Dad,” she said, “it's no use your saying anything to Hector!”

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“Hector?”

“Yes, dad”—a tiny finger indicating her companion who was trying to speak but was prevented from doing so by the firm grinding of Jane's right heel into his left instep—-“I mean Mr. Wade. You know him, don't you? I know what you're thinking, dad, and I tell you it's no use blaming him. I made him talk to me. I made him sit by me. Didn't I, Hector?”

“Daughter!” said Mr. Warburton, in a decidedly episcopal manner, “come with me at once.”

“I'm too old to be spanked, dad,” smiled Jane, “but I'll come with you, and …”

“As to you, sir,” her father had turned to Hector, “you—you are a rascal! An adventurer! You—you … to follow my daughter—to take the same ship—to …”

“When did you book your passage, Mr. Warburton?” came the younger man's cool question.

“Saturday afternoon! Why?”

“Because I booked mine Saturday morning. If you do not believe me, ask the purser. Good day, sir!”

And he bowed to Jane and turned on his heel, while the girl looked at her father rather triumphantly.

The next moment she had slipped her hand through his arm and was walking by his side.

“Dad,” she said, “don't be angry. I just wanted to find out something from Hector, and I did. And I am so glad you are better. Oh—come on! Stop biting your lips!”

Late that night—for, after all, there was real affection between them—Jane confided in her father.

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“Dad,” she said, “I do believe he is innocent. He wouldn't say so—though goodness knows I tried to make him 'fess up!”

For the first time her father smiled.

“I know what a persistent little baggage you are, and I feel it in my heart to be sorry for young Wade if you nagged him.”

“I didn't. I just asked him.”

“All right. I understand. I am quite familiar with your way of—asking. Well—what was the result?”

“I—oh—I don't know. 'Are you really guilty?' I asked him, and he said: 'Yes.' And then I repeated my question once—perhaps twice …”

“Call it seventeen times,” dryly from her father.

“And, finally, in a sort of desperation …”

“Which I personally can well appreciate—”

“He said: 'If you do not believe me, ask my father and my older brother.' Now, isn't that queer?”

“What's queer about it?”

“Why—if I asked his own father, his own brother, they would naturally defend him; wouldn't they? They'd swear up and down that he's innocent—of course! So why does he want me to ask them?”

“Something to that,” grumbled Mr. Warburton; and, suddenly, she put her arms about his neck.

“You and I are pals, aren't we, dad?”

“You bet, little daughter.”

“You wouldn't want me to hide anything from you, would you?”

“Sure not.”

“Well—I am fond of Hector! Very, very fond!”

He flared up.

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“Do you mean to say,” he demanded, in a voice choked with rage, “that that young scoundrel has dared …”

“He?” She shook her head. “Gracious no! He isn't that sort! It was up to me to make the advances …”

“Jane!”

“It's all right, dad. He wouldn't let me. But I am fond of him, and I do believe he is innocent, and … oh, dear …”

And then her father took her on his knees as he used to do when she was a small girl and had broken her pet doll, and talked to her at length and very gently. For, while he believed devoutly in a holy trinity composed of money, respectability, and pedigree, he also believed in fairness: fairness hedged in by certain safety-first, protective, social conventions.

“If Mr. Wade is innocent,” he wound up, “let him prove it. And then—well—we'll talk about it again. But promise me that you will keep away from him as long as he is under a cloud—right or wrong—innocent or guilty. Our social prejudices may be wretched and mean and narrow, but—there they are! We simply have to live up to them this side of Utopia.”

“That's exactly what Hector says,” she replied through her tears. “He told me that he has no right to speak to me—that …”

And then her father mumbled something about Hector Wade, after all, not being such a bad fellow, and thought to himself that he would strengthen the younger man's resolution to keep away from Jane by a few, kindly, but decisive words.

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But there was no need for it. Somehow, the ship seemed to have swallowed Hector. He took his meals in his cabin and only went for a breath of fresh air late at night, nor was it altogether because of the girl that he kept to himself so rigorously. For, knowing his own class and the emphatic, pitiless judgments of his own class when it came to things that “simply aren't done,” he could well imagine what was being said about him in the smoking saloon by the home-English and Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Chinese, all belonging to that social stratum, as hide-bound as the most superstitious Brahmin caste, that puts the niceties of manners and customs far above the niceties of their Christian religion, which preaches forgiveness and plain, straight humanity, and prefers a crimson-handed murderer to a cad.

He had cheated at cards, society said; he had broken an unwritten law; and down there, in the first-class smoking saloon, it was held that a man could put his foot on the decalogue as long as he “played the game.”

And a jolly good rule too; thought Hector, without the slightest trace of bitterness against his country men; for, after all, this unwritten rule had made Britain what she was, fully as much as Magna Charta.

He did not even fell unhappy or depressed when, in his lonely wanderings late at night about the deserted top deck, he heard Jane Warburton's low laugh drift up from the music room.

Hopeless, his love for her? Of course.

Utterly hopeless, and he knew it.

But he stared at the revelation of his love like a new Adam, and he was certain that the original Garden

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 of Eden lay behind her deep, gold-reflecting eyes

Light, frothy love had come to him in the past. Had come and gone.

But now, for the first time, love that was not light had come into his life, and the burden of it was both heavy and sweet.

And all the time, while he was calling himself a silly fool who was trying to rope the far stars with a clumsy, leathern noose of his own clouting; while he cursed himself for a sentimental jackass who ought to be kicked; a wild thing in him, a thing that his past life seemed to have beggared and starved and denied, woke in its full, fresh strength.

Calling to him like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed him. It seemed to summon him back to some thing he had forgotten long ago—centuries ago. It drew him as empty space draws a giddy man, to the very edge of the precipice. Steadily it gained in strength and massiveness until it had enveloped him completely in a silent, receptive atmosphere which he could not shake off, waking or sleeping; and, at the very core of it, at the flaming center of his love, strong yet soft, steely yet pliable, brutal yet loyal, was the sword—the ancient blade which had come out of Asia!

It gave meaning to his life and, somehow, a faint, silvery promise to his love—

His thoughts roamed back frequently to the little shop in Coal Yard Street, off Drury Lane, and to the strange, elderly Asiatic who, more even than his own impulse, had been responsible for his sudden, aimless,

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 fantastic departure for Calcutta—and what lay beyond.

Resolutely, deliberately, being a sober-minded young Englishman, he tried to forget, to deny even to himself, the mysterious veil which cloaked the whole incident, from the advertisement in the newspaper to Ali Yusuf Khan's parting advice that the blade would speak to him when man failed him, or Fate. He preferred to picture Ali as a kindly old man who had taken pity on his unhappiness and had helped him out of the generosity of his heart without any ulterior motive; and so, twenty-four hours before the Kashmere reached Calcutta, he asked the cabin steward to bring pen and ink and paper, and wrote a letter to his impromptu benefactor, winding up with:

And, just then, Ali Yusuf Khan needed help.

For a day after Police Sergeant Horatio Pinker had told the story of the old Oriental's string of diamonds to reporter Jimmy Hawden who, in turn, had mentioned it to a sandy-haired gentleman, the latter had faced Mr. Preserved Higgins in the dingy, cobwebby office on Upper Thames Street, not far from Poultney's Inn.

He had told his tale, and the Cockney millionaire had mused and shaken his head.

“I 'ave 'arf an idea who the blighter is,” he had said, finally, “but I don't know wot 'e's doin' 'ere. Well—

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 alwys be on the syfe side, as the fat boy sed as 'e swalloed 'is tenth mutton pie. Yes—I think 'e'll be syfer in jug, syfer for me, that is!”

And he had gone to the police, had given a description of a necklace of diamonds of which he had been robbed, had sworn to a search warrant by the strength of which a very similar string of diamonds—“as like to mine as peas in a pod,” he had said—had been found in Ali Yusuf Khan's small safe. And, by this entirely crude, but entirely efficient method, the latter was told twenty-four hours later by Police Captain Hodges that everything he might say would be used against him, while Sergeant Horatio Pinker banked a neat check which Mr. Preserved Higgins had given him and dreamt of promotion.

All Yusuf Khan had taken his imprisonment with a great deal of blandly philosophic calm and had driven Mr. Robertson, the young lawyer whom the court had assigned to him, nearly to distraction by absolutely refusing to say where and how he had got the necklace, and by simply smiling into his patriarchal beard when confronted with the fair enough statement that a man in his position had no business having such valuable jewels in his possession.

“Yes,” he had said, in his soft, halting English, “the diamonds—they are mine—yes, saheb. Yes. I can prove it.”

“Then why don't you? Why do you let it come to trial?”

“Because …” Ali Yusuf Khan had interrupted himself. “Tell me, saheb. Mr. Higgins—he must come—I mean be present at my trial?”

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“Yes. At least I can arrange it so.”

“Good. And perhaps you can arrange too that the trial—it will not be for many, many weeks?”

“Well—I may be able to hold it over until the September assizes. But why, man? Heavens above, do you prefer to stay in jail?”

“Yes, saheb, if that should keep Mr. Higgins in town.”

“But—why, man? What's going on in the back of your twisting Oriental brain?”

And Ali Yusuf Khan had smiled guilelessly and had refused to answer any further questions.

Meanwhile, the Kashmere came in sight of Calcutta, and all the world was on deck, exchanging cards and promises to write, which would not be kept, and beginning to reestablish the strict social lines of Anglo-India which divide a deputy assistant commissioner's wife from the wife of a penniless subaltern of native infantry, lines which had been partly forgotten in the humanizing influence of an ocean steamship.

Utterly alone in the throng, with the very stewards knowing and whispering of his disgrace. Hector Wade leaned over the top deck gunwale, looking out to where the sun was rising in the distant east behind lowering cloud banks that were like mountains of gold, glowing lava. There was a gauze-like fog which lifted suddenly, and, minute by minute. Job Charnock's old town came more sharply into the focus. Nearer and nearer it came until he could see the details.

The roofs of the city were bathed in a purple light.

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 The windows flashed with a thousand dazzling reflections. The whole was Calcutta on a perfect day in late summer; a city of brass and copper and gold, hard, shimmering, like the legendary town the Titans once forged out of the molten fragments of a forgotten world.

So the Kashmere steamed up that chained, or rather unchained, monster named the Hoogli, which every once in a while rises kittenishly, gnawing at the water front with sharp teeth, and strewing the surrounding landscape with the torn, battered carcasses of great ships.

Asia! thought Hector. The land which had given him birth! The land which he had forgotten in the soft, yellow Sussex wold! And he seemed to recognize it after the manner of scenes seen in vivid dreams. Like a treasure house it was to him, which he could not enter without the right password, and somehow he knew that he would remember the password—that the ancient blade, which throbbed against his heart, would whisper it to him.

He was curiously excited as he stood there, amidst the chattering, gossiping, laughing crowd of Anglo-Indians, picking out familiar landmarks. Yet his excitement was neither vicious nor violent, but like a delicate network of feelers connecting him with the great, motley Asia which lay there at his feet—“waiting for me, expecting me,” the words came to him unconsciously.

And he stood there and stared and thought, while the Kashmere, obeying the touch of the master pilot, zigzagged her way through the shifting sand banks

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 of the great, man-eating river, and while beyond the arrogant town the highlands came into view, closing in like a tide of stone—as if Asia were there, behind those naked, sun-scorched ridges that glowed like topaz and sapphire—Asia, passive, patient, amorphous, yet minatory—threatening, even in its sleep, the handful of Europeans who were clinging to its outer fringe …

As Hector looked, something hidden seemed to grow within him to a height of abnormal perceptiveness. The sense of a past life, a life which he was dimly remembering again, became magnified with every minute that passed. He felt that presently the power of perceiving would pass into that of doing. He would strike a blow for his fate … a blow … his hand touched the sword that pressed against his heart …

Then, very suddenly, a dry cackle jerked him back into the realities of his life.

“Yes,” somebody was saying, “they kicked him out of the Dragoons. Cheated at cards, the damned cad. What's he going to do in India? Heaven knows. The usual thing, I s'pose—go under—mate up with some low-caste bazaar woman—live native style—come 'round the Club, cadgin' for drinks … you know, Jack! Calcutta's full of his sort …”

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Tollemache Wade, though he regarded any show in which Miss Gwendolyn de Vere, née Bridget O'Callahan, had a part through the roseate spectacles of his personal affection for her, could not deny that “A Pair of Gray Eyes” was not a new musical play.

For, in a way, it was a historic play, a gently reminiscent play that had been cut out, pasted, remodeled, and recast; had been restored to its original form, renamed, and once again rewritten; finally had been rehashed with the help of a collaborator who was an impecunious cousin of the producing manager, and who took seventy-five per cent of the royalties and put it through all the regular paces of condensement and enlargement which make playwriting such a delightful pastime for a nervous writer blessed with an artistic temperament, a conscience, and a lack of humor.

The music contained stray bits from Gilbert and Sullivan's operas and a good many Wagnerian motifs made over and syncopated, while the dialogue was richly spiced with lines from “Charlie's Aunt.” There was, of course, an opening chorus showing a London society matron whose daughters—seventeen of them,

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 including Gwendolyn de Vere—hopped about in bathing suits; interpolated specialties giving imitations of famous imitators; a whole-hearted Irish self-made man, who had founded the Bermuda Onion Trust and whose daughter was being wooed by a Russian Grand-duke who spoke with a Franco-Hebrew accent; and wheezes, the repetition of which would be considered suicidal on any sunny Broadway corner between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Seventh Streets.

Even the tuning of the bass-viol was stolen.

But the play was a success.

“Yes, old dear,” said Gwendolyn de Vere to The Honorable Tollemache Wade, reclining on a couch in her bedroom of the Adelphi Apartments, which was typical of her mind and taste—a hectic rubbish and flummery of make-believe art. “They're turning them away night after night.”

“Corkin', what?”

“Corkin'—rather! But not for me! I haven't even a speakin' bit. And the show has positively made Nell Grosvenor. You know yourself she can't dance, and she can't sing, and—her figure—my word! But there you are, Tollie old chap. She is—made! Why—up at Robinson & Smyth's they named a new brassiere after her!”

“Yes?”

Tollemache Wade looked up, a little worried. He was the sort who, never looking ahead of the passing hour when it was a question of staying his own cravings, had not the heart to look beyond the passing hour's pity where those whom he loved were concerned—

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 the sort who pauperized others as well as himself. And he had an idea of what was coming.

“Nell Grosvenor is going to marry that stockbrokin' johnny next week,” went on Gwendolyn; “what's his name?—oh, yes—Madison, and she's goin' to quit the stage straight off.”

“Who's going to substitute for her?” asked Tollemache; and then the answer which he expected—and feared:

“I am—if you'll come through with a bit of the ready. You know how it is in the profession. A girl hasn't got a chance unless she slips something to the manager—and …”

“But, my dear!” expostulated Tollemache. “I haven't a red, you know, and I'm head-over-heels in debts, and …”

“If you can't, Reggie Bullivant will!” came Gwendolyn's terse, brutal rejoinder.

The result was that Tollemache Wade paid another and humiliating call on Sam Lewis, the usurer of Lombard Street, and, by signing a note for fifteen thousand guineas, received five thousand in cash and the remaining ten thousand in champagne and unsalable rugs; that Gwendolyn de Vere appeared the next week in Nell Grosvenor's rôle, coming on in the first act as an English milkmaid, a posy of property daisies in her hand, dressed in a simple little milking-costume of rose madder charmeuse and a diamond tiara; and that, early in September, Mr. Sam Lewis went to Sussex and interviewed the Earl of Dealle.

He came prepared for the usual scene: hard words,

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 a curt refusal to settle his sons debts, then, after certain threats on the part of Mr. Lewis, a check book drawn out and the pen scratching tremblingly across the pink slip, perhaps with an accompanying “I say. Don't deposit this check for a couple of weeks. I have to have time to turn round and make certain arrangements”—a euphemism for mortgaging or selling another piece of property.

But, for once, Mr. Lewis had made a mistake.

He stated what he wanted, and the earl, hiding the wound in his heart, looked up very much with the expression of the Punch and Judy clown just before he frizzles the policeman with a red-hot poker.

“Sam,” he said, for he had had dealings of his own with the money lender when both had been forty years younger, “you backed the wrong mare this time. Long odds—what, what?—but no starter at all! In other words, you lose, my lad.”

“Lose—what?”

“Fifteen thousand guineas, Samuel. That's the amount, isn't it?”

“Yes, yes—also some other notes long overdue—altogether nearly twenty-five thousand …”

“A whole lot of tin,” came the sardonic rejoinder, “but you should thank the God of Abraham and Jacob that you can afford to lose it.”

“But—m'lord!” Mr. Lewis shivered. He wiped beads of perspiration from his bulbous forehead with a large bandana handkerchief. “You mean to say that …”

“I mean to say that I have resigned being chancellor of the exchequer for Tollemache.”

“But …”

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“Sorry, my lad. The simple truth is that I have not got it—that you can't wring money from a stone—who is stony broke …” He smiled grimly at his own pun.

Mr. Lewis changed from the wheedling to the minatory.

“M'lord,” he said, “if you don't pay …”

“Right-oh! I know exactly what you are going to do. Have to have your little old pound of flesh, what? And since you can't get it in coin of the realm, you'll take it out in ruin and disgrace—by dragging my son through the court of bankruptcy and through the filth of the ha'penny press. Very well. Hector ruined because of Tollemache”—he mumbled to himself; his sardonic bravado was gone; he was just an old man, feeble, pitiful, senile—“and now Tollemache! Divine Providence and all that sort of asinine drivel …”

He collapsed into a chair and cried, as old men cry, with cracked, ludicrous, high-pitched little sobs, while Tomps, the butler, showed Mr. Sam Lewis to the door.

And one of the results of the interview was that Mr. Preserved Higgins, who was pacing up and down the length of the little cobwebby office of Upper Thames Street, happening to glance at the headline of the afternoon newspaper which the sandy-haired gentleman had brought in, stopped suddenly short and uttered the word “Cricky!”

After which he laughed uproariously.

A minute earlier he had poured forth a volley of oaths, some peculiar to his native heath of Hog Lane,

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 others purloined from Whitechapel and Pimlico, still others learned during his years as able-bodied seaman and borrowed from the cosmopolitan throng of the South African gold fields, and others again that are the proud, linguistic privilege of the British army in partibus infidelium.

The sandy-haired gentleman had smoked a woodbine and listened, torn between awe and envy.

“Diddled me, 'e did, that there—crimson Ali Yusuf Khan!” the millionaire had exclaimed, kicking himself viciously in the shin. “Diddled me, by, the Bilked me, by  Kept me 'ere in London, on purpose, for 'is ruddy trial wot's comin' orf in the September assizes so's to keep me aw'y from Calcutta where 'Ector Wade is rubbin' noses with the Hemperor of Dollars and Cents. Yes! They syled on the syme ship, the, I just found out. And 'ere Babu Bansi writes me that the princess, too, is on 'er w'y to Calcutta, doubtless to meet 'Ector and that there plurry Yank.”

“But,” the sandy-haired gentleman had interrupted, “it seems to me the Babu should have …”

“Should 'ave nothink!” Mr. Higgins was fair enough. “'E did 'is part. Cybled me as soon as the old Ameer 'ad kicked the bucket and told me wot 'e'd found out about … you know. 'Ere”—opening the small, plump safe and taking from amongst his private files the wire which Bansi had sent him the day of the Ameer's funeral, addressed to “Gloops.”

He had read aloud:

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 ""

‘Well?” he had continued. “Didn't you and me chuck ourselves all over the bloomin' plyce and look through the British Museum and Westminster Abbey and the Office of 'Eraldry until we'd found the nyme of that there family with the double-'eaded lion? And, after Bansi 'ad wired me particulars, didn't I establish social relytions? Didn't I go down to Sussex and visit them—two-'eaded lions and mortgage and rotten grub and all? Didn't I do everything I bloody well could? Could anybody 'ave been more cyreful than me? And now—bilked, diddled—Gawd stroike me pink! That's wot I am! Done brown! Like a snut-nosed brat with the whoopin' cough and two left feet!”

Then he happened to glance at the newspaper headline, uttered the mysterious “Cricky!” laughed uproariously, and turned to the sandy-haired gentleman who was just about to decide that his employer had lost his reason.

“Don't you see?” he said. “Ain't Tollemache a son of that there two-'eaded lion family as much as 'Ector? And, with good old Sam Lewis puttin' on the thumb screws, ain't 'e every bit as down and out as 'Ector—Gawd bless 'em both? And 'e ain't as proud as 'Ector and I'll 'ave 'im eat out o' my 'and in no time. Mebbe it's even better, 'im bein' the older son. I ain't a religious man, 'avin' been too busy all my life and my people 'avin' been chapel folk, but I call this bloomin' providential!”

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He looked at his watch.

“Five o'clock,” he went on. “You'll find the Honorable Tollemache at the Criterion a-drownin' of his sorrers, and if you don't find 'im there, arsk the barmaid at the Lorraine, on Leicester Square. She'll know. Anyway, you get 'im and bring 'im 'ere as quick's you can!”

And the sandy-haired gentleman was off on a run, taking a short cut through Suffolk Lane and disappearing in the blotchy shadows of the Cannon Street Railway Terminus, while Mr. Preserved Higgins telephoned to his devoted adherent, Horatio Pinker of the metropolitan police, recently promoted to desk sergeant, and asked him to see to it that the case against Ali Yusuf Khan be quashed, immediately, and without any undesirable publicity.

He said that he had found the diamond necklace, that he was sorry to have, quite unwittingly, preferred a false charge against the Oriental, and that he would be only too glad to send the latter a good-sized check as balm for his hurt dignity and reputation.

At the other end of the wire, Sergeant Horatio Pinker turned to a colleague.

“Ain't Mr. Higgins the gent, though?” he asked.

Fifteen minutes later, the Cockney millionaire was wagging his russet beard at Tollemache Wade, who was sitting across from him, distracted, nervous, a little the worse for drink.

“I'll do it,” wound up Mr. Higgins, “because of your father, m'boy. Is it a bargain?”

“Oh—I s'pose so.”

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“Can you be ready by to-morrow morning—let's s'y to-morrow noon?”

"Rather. There's nothing to keep me in town, you know—” and Tollemache thought, bitterly, that an hour earlier Gwendolyn de Vere's maid had told him that her mistress was not at home, and that, from her drawing-room, he had heard Gwendolyn's light laugh and Reggie Bullivant's answering basso.

"All right, m'boy. Buy everything you want. Charge it up to me. We leave to-morrow via Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, then to Orenburg, and over the Russian military r'ylw'y to Bokhara, Central Asia.”

“I haven't a passport,” said Tollemache Wade, “and I rather doubt if, with this scandal of mine, bankruptcy and drummin' out of the army for conduct unbecomin' and old Gwen givin' interviews to the reporters and all that, you know, the foreign office will give me one.”

“Don't you bother your 'ead about passports, old cock. I 'ave friends from 'ere to Timbuktu, and I 'ave their number, every blasted last one's of 'em, and I knows 'ow to grease palms tactful-like. There's a lad at the Russian Embassy who'll do it dirt cheap. And now—off with you; and remember, me bucko, not a word to anybody, or the bargain's orf, see?”

That evening, using a bizarre code which completely baffled the local Tamerlanistan manager-of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, he sent a wire to his Babu satellite, and remarked to the sandy-haired gentleman:

“I'd like to see the fyces of the good old Hemperor of Dollars and Cents and of 'Ector when they finds

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 out 'ow I'm goin' to kick 'em in the south side of their pants—and they ain't goin' to find out for a long time yet. By the w'y, look up Babu Bansi's old correspondence and see wot the blighter's nyme is—you know, the governor of the western marches of Tamerlanistan. Phone me, and then go straight to Pollocks, on Bond Street, and get me a 'ole lot of them jewels Oriental potentytes likes—off-color diamonds and moonstones and opals and things. Pollocks will know. 'Ave 'em charge it up to me and damn the expense. Then, to-morrow early, go to the Smith & Union Bank …”

And a string of precise instructions, since Mr. Preserved Higgins' method of doing business, once he had arrived at a decision, was as simple and direct as a question in the Rule-of-Three.

Half an hour later he was closeted with his friend, Baron Vassily Ilyitch de Todleben, of the Russian Embassy, who was one of those men who have to have blatantly outward signs of the fact that they are enjoying themselves: a motor-car, a bottle of champagne, a chorus girl, or a chair in a roulette game; and who, being congenitally impecunious, and as congenitally unscrupulous, was willing not to let his left hand know what his right was taking.

“Yes,” he said to Mr. Preserved Higgins, “I'll find out what I can about that Abderrahman Yahiah Khan—governor of the western marches of Tamerlanistan, didn't you say?”

“Yes, Baron.”

“All right. I have a friend in Moscow, a high official in the Bureau for Pan-Russian Central-Asian

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 Propaganda. I shall send him a wire, and he will get into communication with you.”

“Thanks, my lad, and don't you be afraid—it 'as nothing to do with politics. I ain't doin' any dirty work for England. It's just plain business.”

“That's all right, Mr. Higgins.” The Russian waved a white, excessively well-kept hand. “And now, as to the other little matter …”

And he affixed the Tsar's seal to two passports, one for Mr. Higgins himself, the other for a gentleman by the name of Henry Wallace Wilberforce who, to judge from the written description on the stamped paper, bore a marked physical resemblance to The Honorable Tollemache Wade.

The latter's brother, in the meantime, was worrying about the same matter of passports.

It did not take him over twenty-four hours to discover that he had been right in his surmise and that India, as represented and crystallized by its premier city of Calcutta, held out as little chance to him as home-England. It was the identical story from Park Street to the Howrah Bridge, from Fort William to the Towers of Silence, from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street to Lal Bazaar: here and there he recognized familiar faces, some dead white with the heat of the tropics, others still ruddy with recent British beef and beer.

But it was as he had known it would be:

“Oh, yes. Wade. Hector Wade, old Dealle's son, chap who used to be in the Dragoons—you know. Rotten cad—you heard about it—what?”

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And shoulders shrugging, eyes looking pity or contempt, and the very old maids who had been sent to India by their doting parents as a last chance at the matrimonial grab-bag, used their lorgnettes in the approved Mayfair style.

Yes. Calcutta was only an imperial suburb, a tropical annex to Belgravia and Marlborough House!

Within three days of his arrival the thing had become nearly a pathological obsession with him, and he seemed to read the sneering, malicious story of his disgrace in every face he saw in the crowded thorough fares of Calcutta. He imagined that even the natives were looking at him with contempt: the patent-leathered Bengalis, oily with ghee; the lean, monkey-faced Madrassis; the acrid-scented Sansis with baskets of unclean food slung across their backs; the ruffianly Punjaubis, the soft-stepping, neat Parsees, and the big boned, gray-eyed, white-skinned men from the farther north, who looked about them with an odd mixture of wonder and derision.

Later on, he used to remark that it was only the touch of the blade against his heart—“I know it sounds no end silly,” he would add—that kept him, if not from becoming stark mad, then at least from committing assault and battery with intent to kill on some innocent Briton or harmless Bengali.

But, out of the blade, some flooding, massive energy, like a tide of unknown power and beauty and glory, seemed to surge through him, driving his misgivings away with the strength of tremendous, dynamic values and, finally, on the fifth day, quite suddenly, directing his feet to the government office on Park

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 Street where passports were made out for Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the North.

For he had made up his mind to leave Calcutta, India, to go clear, clear away—out into the far, yellow, brooding heart of Asia.

Perhaps Ali Yusuf Khan had been right.

Perhaps the old, tired, patient soul of Asia needed men like himself, young and strong and unhappy …

But when he stated his errand to Sir James Rivet-Carnac, the official in charge, that crimson-necked, purse-mouthed knight smiled in his most pinchbeck manner.

He toyed with his visitor's card.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but are you by any chance that Hector Wade who …”

“I am!” came the terse reply. “What about it?”

“Only that the British-Indian government has a certain prestige to keep up in the North, in Central Asia—with Russia so infernally close, you know. We can't grant passports to”—he coughed; then, brutally—“to people of your kidney, Mr. Wade. What would the natives think of us? Good day, sir.”

And, as Hector was about to cross the threshold:

“By the way, no use trying to cross the border without a passport. I am going to have you watched. Fair warning, don't you know.”

He turned to his assistant after Hector had left:

“I wager long odds that young beggar made up his mind to go North, passport or no passport. Jolly determined looking, what? Too bad he did that foolish, caddish thing. Such a frightful waste of material

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 from an imperial point of view. Oh, well—we'll have him shadowed. We can't afford to have chaps like him floatin' loose about Asia—what with these stinking Babus preaching home rule and our beloved white Babus home in England helping them and all that …”

Sir James was a good physiognomist. He had read Hector's thoughts correctly. For, somehow, the other's refusal to issue him a passport had only strengthened his stubborn resolution to go North, to cross the Himalayas, to look beyond the ranges for the chance which England and India, the Empire, denied him.

Yes. He would go.

But—how?

For even if he managed to evade Sir James Rivet-Carnac's watchers, there was the vital question of money, since the ocean journey, including the tips aboard and other incidental expenses, and his five days' stay in Calcutta, had practically exhausted the money which Ali Yusuf Khan had lent him.

“What shall I do? How can I go?”

He asked himself the question as he looked from the balcony of his room, out into the night cloaked streets whence rose a confused mingling of sounds: voices in many languages, rising, then decreasing, the shouts of itinerant fruit and lemonade venders, the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of some woman's glass bracelets, a shred of laughter flung carelessly to the winds, a sudden dramatic shriek …

The sounds leaped up to his ear—the sounds of

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 India, of Asia—cruel, beckoning, mysterious, scented, fascinating, portentous, inexplicable—

The rune of Asia—and how could he resist the call of it?

Something tugged at his soul.

If he had wings to fly from the window, to launch himself across the purple haze of the town, to alight on some flat roof, then to rise again and swing out and beyond on the sweep of the northbound wind across the great Indian peninsula; over the central jungles that stretched like a great sea of vegetation, an entangled, exuberant blending of leaves and spiky creepers and waxen, musky flowers, a rolling wave of green life; over the perfumed valley of Kashmere, the foot-hills that rolled down like enormous, over lapping planes; clear across the carved, sardonic immensities of the Himalayas where the harried sun hid and shivered amongst the northern snows … and out into the heart of Asia … if he had wings to fly!

“What shall I do? How can I go?”

Again he asked himself the question, and, suddenly, he thought of Ali Yusuf Khan's parting words:

“Trust the blade. It will speak to you when man fails you—or Fate.”

He felt slightly self-conscious, slightly ludicrous. For he was an “Englishman, a European, an average Occidental swinging, intellectually and emotionally, half way between Christianity and biology, and what was all this painted, twisted, mazed Oriental tommyrot

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 to him? All this mad talk about trusting a dagger, asking a senseless, lifeless length of forged steel to speak to him!

His hand fingered the hilt of the weapon—he had not unsheathed it since that night in Coal Yard Street—while his mind, like a captive bird, was beating against the cage bars of his prosy, two-and-two-is-four intelligence, his typically British refusal to believe the incredible—even after he had seen it happen.

Then his lips curled in a lop-sided smile.

“Oh, well,” he murmured, apologetically, in the general direction of the moon that was racing through the clouds like delicate ivory flotsam, “it can't hurt,” and he drew the blade from the jeweled shagreen scabbard into which Ali Yusuf Khan had fitted it and, from a piece of silver wire scroll work just below the hilt where it had been wedged, a paper fluttered to the ground.

Mechanically he picked it up, and saw that there were words on it, in Persian, signed “Ali Yusuf Khan,” and read;

Hector gave a low laugh. He did not know why he laughed; did not have time to psychologize about it. For, the next second, he had picked up his hat, left the room and the hotel, and was out into the smoky, purple, fantastic Indian night, while, two seconds later, his mind and body acting together with almost uncanny

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 precision, he remembered Sir James Rivet-Carnac's warning that he would be followed, turned swiftly beneath the haggard light of a street lamp, saw that a short, lean Madrassi was slinking close behind him, and had the point of his blade on the man's windpipe.

“Be careful,” he whispered, “this knife may slip. Talk just as if we were friends.”

“Yes, saheb.” The man's teeth clicked together like castanets.

“All right. Now—answer quick and low. From the police, aren't you?”

“Yes, saheb.”

“Anybody else following me?”

“No, saheb.”

“Sure you are speaking the truth?”

“Yes, yes, yes! By Vishnu and Shiva!”—as the blade was pricking his skin.

“Good. Now come along. And walk gently—be careful or …”

And he walked the Madrassi away from the Great Eastern Hotel and into a little, shadow-blotched park which he had visited earlier in the day and which was deserted, except for the ubiquitous crows.

“Sorry I have to be rough,” he said; and, the next minute, he had him on his back, had him gagged securely with his handkerchief and the heavy leather gloves he carried in his pocket; tore off the man's turban cloth and waist shawl, and tied him hand and foot.

Then, very leisurely, he left the park and walked

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 to Old Court House Street where he asked the stolid English policeman the way to the Colootallah.

“Place there called Hyder Ahmet's Gully, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir. But I wouldn't go there if I were you, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” replied the policeman, who had twenty years' Calcutta service to his record, “it is the rottenest, stinkingest, most unregenerate patch of crime in our whole East Indian Empire. Because a white man ain't safe there—leastways this time of night, sir. Oh, well”—as Hector insisted—“it's your own funeral. You go down through the Burra Bazaar—”

“I know where that is—”

“Past the Jora Bagan and the Machua … and he gave the directions as precisely as if it had been London.

“Thank you.”

And a pleasant tinkle of silver, and Hector was off toward the Burra Bazaar at a good round clip, and bidding farewell to the white man's Calcutta, to Government House and green tea and respectability.

On he walked, past the Jora Bagan and the Machua, and plunged into a network of narrow streets where the poor, unwashed, and diseased of all India's motley races seemed to live together in friendship and evil odors. Not many lights stole through the shuttered balconies of the packed, greasy houses. Overhead, between the two facades, he saw a strip of paleness which evidently was doing duty for a bit of moonlit sky.

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“Where is Hyder Ahmed's Gully?” he asked a native.

“Over there, saheb!”

The man pointed and, with a word of thanks, Hector was off again, through streets that grew steadily more narrow and crooked, with a glimpse of smoky, discouraged sky above the roof tops revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, the roadway ankle deep in squidgy, sticky blue slime, beggars and roughs and lepers slinking and pushing against him, and a fetid stink hanging over it all like an evil pall; until, directed by another native who, like the policeman, gave him good-natured warning and advised him to return to his hotel, he found himself in Hyder Ahmet Khan's Gully, a long, crooked cul-de-sac that ran the gamut of white-washed walls without windows or doors, mysterious, useless looking, and that was sealed at the farther end by a tall, lonely house, rising into the purple welter of the night with an immense abandon of fretted, tortured stone and masonry work, with bird's-nest balconies and crazy, twisted, bulbous roofs and spires, the whole thing typically Hindu in its maniacal, architectural extravagance.

Not a soul was about. There was not even a sound. It was as if all life had been cut short at the entrance of the Gully, and everything Hector was—racially, traditionally, culturally—bristled within him. He saw a glimmer of burnished metal, bent, looked, and saw that it was the lock of a door set low into the house, to the left of it a brass plate with the name of Mehmet Iddrissy Khan engraved in Persian letters, to the right an old-fashioned, iron knocker.

He stood undecided, rather frightened. Somehow,

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 he felt that it was this door which stood between life as he had known it heretofore and the life of the future—whatever the future might bring.

Should he take the—yes—the plunge. For it was that.

Again he hesitated. Then, suddenly, a wisp of laughter drifted out of the nowhere, a woman's laughter, soft, tinkling, silvery, and he took a deep breath like a man about to dive, and lifted the door knocker—brought it down sharply—banng!—with a dull, portentous thud; and, a few moments later, from the inside, came the brushing of feet, a cough, and the door opened to disclose a tall, elderly Hindu who was holding in his right hand a flickering oil lamp and who surveyed the late visitor with suspicion.

“What do you wish?” he asked, and Hector thought it typical of the neighborhood, the Colootallah, that the man did not use the courteous “saheb.”

“I wish to speak to Mehmet Iddrissy Khan.”

“About what?”

Hector flared up.

“None of your confounded business,” he cried; then, as the other was about to close the door, he stopped him with a gesture, laughed, drew the blade from his pocket and gave it, hilt foremost, to the other.

“Show this to your master,” he said. “Tell him it is all the credentials I have.”

“Very well;” and the Hindu shut the door in Hector's face.

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 the blade with him, he would have walked away as fast as his legs would have let him. But—“the blade was an integral part of me, don't you see?” he would add. “I couldn't have left without it. Of course not. That bit of steel had stuck by me.”

He did not have to wait long. For, a minute later, the door opened again, and this time the Hindu salaamed deeply, and there was something almost like awe in his opaque eyes, and respect in his voice as he bade the other enter.

“Thy people are sick with longing for thee, saheb!” he said in purring Persian. “Careful, Protector of the Pitiful! The steps are slippery!”

And, the lamp high in his hand and throwing flickering, fantastic shadows, he led Hector through a labyrinth of rooms, some of them ablaze with raw, clashing colors, others in dull, somber shades which melted into each other; through wide corridors, supported by pillars whose capitals were shaped into pendant lotus forms, or crowned with lateral struts carved into the likenesses of horsemen or war-girt elephants. There was furniture of all ages and climes, from century old sandal-wood pieces chip-carved into flat relief to massive tables topped with slabs of Bokharan lapis lazuli; from wonderful, old, red Chinese lac to, here and there, a horribly clashing, cheap European incongruity … certainly a very wealthy man's house, decided Hector.

Once or twice they encountered native servants in rainbow-colored silks, who stepped aside and salaamed with extended hands, but even in those rooms which

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 were empty of human life Hector was maddeningly conscious of watching eyes and listening ears. He said something of the sort to his guide who smiled.

“This is India, saheb,” he said. “This is an Indian house. Day and night, it is full of eyes and ears.” He stopped. “Look. Listen.”

He pointed at a bull's-eye cut low in an unexpected wall. He coughed loudly. There was a rustle of silken garments, and the noise of bare feet pattering away.

Another time, when directly between his feet Hector heard a sound of deep breathing, the Hindu showed him a tiny peep-hole in the mosaic work which covered the floor.

“A servant's servant,” he whispered, “listening to the gossip of the inner rooms, so as to bring a report to his superior, another report to another superior, still another, until it finally reaches the right ear.”

“Whose?” came the blunt question.

“The ear of the Princess Aziza Nurmahal, ruler of Tamerlanistan;” and, just as Hector was dim-groping in his memory where he had heard that last word, just as some recess in his brain flashed back the reply that Mr. Preserved Higgins had mentioned it a second before Hector's fist had hit him between the eyes and stretched him unconscious on the London pavement, the Hindu repeated:

“The Princess Aziza Nurmahal, ruler of Tamerlanistan!” with a loud voice, like a herald, drew aside a brocade curtain stiff with embroidery, and motioned the other to enter.

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Hector stepped across the threshold, while his guide salaamed and disappeared.

Curled upon a couch, he saw a slim young girl, dressed native style in a sari of pale, rose-colored silk, shot with orange and violet and bordered with tiny seed pearls. Her face was small and round and exquisitely chiseled. Her hair was parted in the middle and of a glossy, bluish black, mingled with flowers and jewels.

She rose at Hector's approach, smiled, and walked up to him. It was evident that she expected the Englishman to speak; for an eager light was in her immense, black eyes; her narrow hands fluttered like butterflies; her lips were half open.

Hector coughed. He did not know what to say, did not know what to make of the whole situation. He had expected to find some wealthy native merchant who needed a young Englishman for his business; perhaps an elderly Brahmin who wanted a tutor for his son; perhaps some semi-independent Indian princeling who wished to avail himself of his military training.

But—to be ushered, in the middle of the night, into the presence of a young girl, a young girl of the Orient, a princess?

And to find her alone, and unveiled?

Why—it was incredible; and, momentarily, a sordid, unworthy thought flashed through his mind, to be quickly scotched as he looked at her friendly open face.

But he was tongue-tied, and then, quite suddenly, she threw her arms about his neck, drew his head down, and kissed him full on the lips.

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“I have waited for thy coming, my lord,” she said, in a low, musical voice. “I have waited long!”

And Hector did exactly what any other clean bred, self-conscious young Briton would have done under the circumstances.

He blushed a painful brick-red, tried to remove the gentle pressure from around his neck, and murmured something very foolish and entirely inadequate:

“Please! I say—you mustn't—you know …”—positively mid-Victorian.

And the girl broke into a peal of irrepressible laughter.

“It was not the kiss of the love of passion, my lord,” she said. “It was the kiss of a sister's love.”

“A—sister's love?”

He felt more clumsy, less sure of himself, than ever.

“Yes!” the princess looked at him, utterly serious. “For we are sister and brother, thou and I! Rocked in the same cradle of Fate! Mated to Fate by the wooing of swords!”

Words which were quite without sense or meaning to The Honorable Hector Wade who, at that moment, was wishing fervently that he were back on the yellow, sandy Downs of Sussex.

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very next moment, with startling suddenness, Hector passed from the stage of boyish, awkward, rather petty embarrassment to one of tremendous, voiceless excitement.

Not for the slightest fraction of a second did he lose his grip on his natural, perceptive faculties, did he forget his sober English commonsense. On the contrary, straight through, his five senses worked harmoniously together. Even while his eyes saw on a low taboret not far from him the ancient blade which had been his “Open Sesame!” ever since he had left the house of his ancestors, while his hand, almost automatically, picked it up and returned it to his pocket, his brain flashed the message that he should ask this tiny, picturesque bit of Oriental womanhood bluntly to tell him what she meant by her mysterious words.

Already his lips had shaped the query: “What do you …?” when, instantaneously, an abstruse something in his soul surged up and submerged the tail end of his sentence in a bizarre, yet deliberate decision, realization rather, that he must accept whatever Fate had in store for him unquestioningly.

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He bowed low before the princess.

“I, too, have waited long,” he said, “waited long for the wooing of swords!”

And, strangely, incongruously, though at the time there was no sense to him in his own words, he felt, he knew, that he was not telling a lie, that he was not acting a part, that a hidden, yet enormously vital element of his inner consciousness had dictated the words—out of a terribly intense, terribly ancient, terribly prolonged yearning.

Neither then, nor during the baroque, twisted adventures of the weeks to come, did he stop to analyze why thus, without a question, without a concise doubt, without a demand for explanation, without natural, normal curiosity even, he bowed his head before this strange Fate that had come to him out of the purple Indian night—with a young Oriental princess' soft kiss, with her dim words about Brother and Sister and the Wooing of Swords.

Later on, he would try to explain it out of existence by saying that the romance, the flaming spirit of the moment, had carried him away as the wind carries away brittle leaves; that his old life was dead, that here beckoned the cresset of a new life which he must follow, untrammeled by the past, untrammeled even by the desires and doubts and natural reactions of the past.

And this attempt at explanation was palpably wrong; was the bitter fruit of his racial English inhibition to be as logical and inquisitive and truth-seeking in psychic, as he was in mental and physical,

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 matters. Had it not been for this racial inhibition, this artificial, typically Anglo-Saxon restraint, he would have told himself that, the very moment he saw Aziza Nurmahal, the very moment he heard her fantastic, incongruous greeting, the impression came to him that he had lived through all this before and that the answer to it was not in the princess' life, not in his own, not in any one individual's puny, negligible existence, but in the throbbing, eternal life of Asia.

He would have told himself that which, sub-psychically, he knew to be the truth: namely, that this Asia was not a mere Continent, steaming and flaunting and sweating beneath the coppery sun of the tropics, not a mere geographical or political term, but a Being; a giant Being, with pulses and feelings and motley ambitions of its own; and that he, Hector Wade, Englishman out of Sussex, and reputed card-cheater, was an integral part of this Being.

Thus his subconscious thoughts, those thoughts which he was ashamed to shape even in the secrecy and close intimacy of his own soul; while the princess clapped her hands and, a moment later, a tall, elderly Moslem, green turbaned, simply dressed, came into the room. There was something about him, less an actual, physical resemblance, than in his easy charm of manner and the strange, attractive mingling of kindliness and shrewdness that glistened in his eyes and played about his lips, which reminded Hector of Ali Yusuf Khan.

Aziza Nurmahal ran up to him, and took both his hands in hers.

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“The saheb has decided, Mehmet Iddrissy Khan,” she said, vivaciously, joyously. “He, too, has waited long for the wooing of swords!”

She turned to the Englishman as if asking him to confirm her words, and the latter suppressed a grim, sardonic smile.

The wooing of swords—he thought to himself—rather like some dashed Greek tragedy chorus, and about as intelligible to him, chiefly considering that he had never been exactly tophole at the classics!

But, what reason did he have to vent his mocking, unhappy humor on these people, who trusted him, surely trusted him, since they had let him, the saheb, the Christian, the foreigner, who was an outcast from his own land, into the jealously guarded intimacy of their Oriental household—and at night—with no credentials except an ancient weapon with a blurred, golden pattern on hilt and blade? And there was something so anxiously appealing in the girl's hooded, sable eyes, something so pathetically expectant in Mehmet Iddrissy Khan's shrewd, gray, gold-flecked eyes, and, finally, something in his own soul, so abstrusely compelling and jubilantly reckless, that his spoken words gave no inkling of the ironic thoughts that had flashed through his mind.

“Yes!” he said, looking straight at the others.

And he added, in purring, gliding Persian metaphor, in that cannily hyperbolic manner dear to turbaned and maddeningly annoying to hatted humanity:

“What I could not find in the written book, the blade whispered to me. My eyes were red and swollen with the revel of pain and despair, my soul was a

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 bloated and useless thing, my life a blackened crucible—but the blade flashed free, and I heard the muffled, sobbing drums of victory!”

“Rather neatly turned, that!” he said to himself, with a fleeting recurrence to his disturbing, saturnine mood, while Mehmet Iddrissy Khan raised lean, brown hands.

“Praise Allah!” he said, sonorously. “Praised be Allah, the Just, the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the King of the Day of Judgment, the Holder of the Scales of Mercy and of Wisdom with the Strength of His Hands, the Opener of the Locks of Souls with the golden Keys of His Understanding!”—and, in that typically Oriental way which so distresses Europeans and which permits its possessor to pass rapidly, without jarring break and without the slightest feeling of ludicrousness or self-consciousness, from a gorgeously epic or religious height to the level, drab plane of constructive, logically reasoning practicability:

“Time presses, saheb. When wilt thou be ready to start for the North, for Central Asia?”

“To-night,” replied Hector, “this very minute,” thinking with bitter satisfaction that there was nothing West of the Howrah Bridge or East of Fort William to keep him in Calcutta except—yes!—he added in his mind, then with the spoken word:

“Passport! What about a passport? I talked to Rivet-Carnac to-day and …”

“Insh'allah!” Mehmet Iddrissy Khan cut through the sentence with a wagging, derisive thumb on which twinkled a great star sapphire.

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