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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