Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/32

, hungry eyes were the same. He was shaved clean, his hair was parted in the middle, and he had cut his eyebrows.

Further, he carried himself as if he had been drilled, and was the very model, even to the brown complexion, of some British officer who had had a long spell in India. He had a monocle, too, which he stuck in his eye, and every trace of the American had gone out of his speech.

"My hat! Mr Scudder—" I stammered.

"Not Mr Scudder," he corrected; "Captain Theophilus Digby, of the Seventh Gurkhas, presently home on leave. I'll thank you to remember that, sir."

I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own couch, more cheerful than I had been for the past month. Things did happen occasionally, even in this God-forgotten metropolis!

I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a row at the smoking-room door.