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 his own shrewdness and thinking that right here he was going to even his score with Miss Warburton, “is positively deadly to delicate complexions.”

“That settles it,” said Jane, serenely. “We'll wait till after the monsoons, shan't we, dad?”

Mr. Warburton agreed. After all, he decided, there was no hurry and it would be better for him to wait until he had word from the Babu Chandra, and he had found out that Hector had left his hotel and, presumably Calcutta, so that he needn't be nervous in regard to his daughter.

And so Sir James returned to attend to some late work at his office—where, a few days later, he frowned at a report telegraphed by one of his sub-agents stationed at Peshawar, near the border of Afghanistan, which said that no person resembling Mr. Hector Wade had crossed the border or tried to; only the bi-weekly caravans for Kabul and Kandahar that filed through the Khybar Pass, and some independent Afghan, Sart, and Hindki traders with proper passports. Furthermore, for a while to come, it would be impossible for said Hector Wade to get through the Khybar or any other of the minor Northwestern Province border stations as, because of some threatening trouble with the tribesmen, nobody would be allowed, until further orders, to travel out of Peshawar for the North, with the exception of the reigning princess of Tamerlanistan, to whom British, Afghans, and warring tribesmen had granted the courtesy of free conduct.

She was accompanied by her retinue and her cousin, the young prince Al Nakia.