Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/118

 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?”