tion short on that account." He looked remorsefully into
Hillyard's face. "In any case, the rainy season was coming on, wasn't
it?"

"Yes, my expedition was really ended when the message reached me,"
Hillyard was forced to admit.

"That's good," said the indifferent gentleman, brightening. "You will
see Bendish, of course, in England. By what ship do you sail? It's not
very pleasant here, is it?"

"I shall sail on the _Himalaya_ in a week's time."

"Right!" said the official, and he nodded farewell and dipped his nose
once more into his papers.

Hillyard walked to the door, conscious that he looked the fool he felt
himself to be. But at the door he turned in a sort of exasperation.

"Can't you tell me at all why Bendish's friend wants my help?" he asked.

It was at this moment that the indifferent gentleman had the inspiration
of his life.

"I haven't an idea, Mr. Hillyard," he replied. "Perhaps he has got into
difficulties in the writing of a revue."

The answer certainly drove Hillyard from the room without another word.
He stood outside the door purple with heat and indignation. Hillyard
neither overrated nor decried his work. But to be dragged away from the
buffalo and the reed-buck of the Dinder River in order to be told that
he was a writer of revues. No! That was carrying a bad joke too far.

Hillyard stalked haughtily along the corridor towards the outer door,
but not so fast but that a youth passed him with a sheet of paper in his
hand. The youth went into the room where Government cablegrams were
coded. The sheet of paper which he held in his hand was inscribed with a
message that Martin Hillyard would leave Alexandria in a week's time on
the s.s. _Himalaya_. And the message strangely enough was not addressed
to Paul Bendish at all. It was headed, "For Commodore Graham.
Admiralty." The great Summons had in fact come, although Hillyard knew
it not.

He travelled in consequence leisurely by sea. He started from Alexandria
after half the month of June had gone, and he was thus in the Bay of
Biscay on that historic morning of June the twenty-eighth, when the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia Duchess of Hohenberg, were
murdered in the streets of Saravejo. London, when he reached it, was a
choir of a million voices not yet tuned to the ringing note of one. It
was incredible that the storm, foreseen so often over the port wine,
should really be bursting at last. Mediation will find a way. Not