Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/173

 I follow up that blow with my green British Museum ticket, as tattered as a flag in a knight's chapel.

"You'll get found out," he says, with my documents in his hand. "You've got your thumbs. You'll be measured. They'll refer to the central registers, and there you'll be!"

"That's just it," I say, "we sha'n't be."

He reflects. "It's a queer sort of joke for you two men to play," he decides, handing me back my documents.

"It's no joke at all," I say, replacing them in my pocket-book.

The post-mistress intervenes. "What would you advise me to do?"

"No money?" he asks.

"No."

He makes some suggestions. "Frankly," he says, "I think you have escaped from some island. How you got so far as here I can't imagine, or what you think you'll do But anyhow, there's the stuff for your thumbs."

He points to the thumbmarking apparatus and turns to attend to his own business.

Presently we emerge from the office in a state between discomfiture and amusement, each with a tramway ticket for Lucerne in his hand and with sufficient money to pay our expenses until the morrow. We are to go to Lucerne because there there is a demand for comparatively unskilled labour in carving wood, which seems to us a sort of work within our range and a sort that will not compel our separation.