but there was a card which stated that the same could be purchased at
the office. He laughed. A pitcher of water and a bowl stood on a small
table, which, by the presence of a mirror (that could not in truth
reflect anything but light and darkness), served as a dresser. These
he used to good advantage, drying his face and hands on the white
counterpane of the bed, and laughing quietly as he did so. Next he lit
a pipe, whose capacity for tobacco was rather less than that of a lady's
thimble, sat in a chair by the window, smoked quietly, and gazed down on
the busy street.

It was yet early in the morning; sellers of vegetables, men and women
peasants, with bare legs and wooden shoes, driving shaggy Servian ponies
attached to low, cumbersome carts, passed and repassed, to and from the
markets. A gendarme, leaning the weight of his shoulder on the guard of
a police saber, rested against the corner of a wine shop across the way.
Students, wearing squat caps with vizors, sauntered indolently along,
twirling canes and ogling all who wore petticoats. Occasionally the
bright uniform of a royal cuirassier flashed by; and the Englishman
would lean over the sill and gaze after him, nodding his head in
approval whenever the cuirassier sat his horse well.

In the meantime the gendarme, who followed him from the station, had
entered the hotel, hastily glanced at the freshly written name, and made
off toward the palace.

"Well, here we are," mused the Englishman, pressing his thumb into the
bowl of his pipe. "The affair promises some excitement. To-morrow will
be the sixth; on the twentieth it will be a closed incident, as the
diplomats would say. I don't know what brought me here so far ahead of
time. I suppose I must look out for a crack on the head from some one
I don't know, but who knows me so deuced well that he has hunted me
in India and England, first with fine bribes, then with threats." He
glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the gun cases. "It was a
capital idea, otherwise a certain ubiquitous customs official, who lies
in wait for the unwary at the frontier, would now be an inmate of
a hospital. To have lived thirty-five years, and to have ground out
thirteen of them in her Majesty's, is to have acquired a certain disdain
for danger, even when it is masked. I am curious to see how far these
threats will go. It will take a clever man to trap me. The incognito is
a fort. By the way, I wonder how the inspectors at t