That’s all very well, but suppose he gets to the top of the tree, as the fellow will, and issues a Declaration of Independence? At least he’ll be Premier, and come over to a conference some day. Val will be Secretary for the Colonies, probably (unless he has come that cropper). There’s a situation for you! Well, I shall just leave town. I daresay I sha’n’t be missed.
Lady Lexington carried it off well. She said that, from a strain of romance she had observed in the girl, the marriage was just what was to be expected of Katharine Constantine.
SLIM-FINGERED JIM
I
“WHAT did he get? “I asked. I had been working in my own room all the morning and had not seen the papers—they arrived from London about half-past eleven.
“Seven years’ penal servitude,” said our host the Major with grim satisfaction.
“Stiff!” I commented.
“Not a bit too much,” asserted the Major, helping himself to game pie again—he is a good luncher. “He’s a thoroughly bad lot—a professional thief, and a deuced clever one. It’s his first conviction, but it ought to have been his tenth, I should say.”
“He was certainly in that big American bond robbery,” said Crookes, “though he got off that time. Oxford man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. In fact, I believe I was up one term with him,” said Millington. “I must have seen him, I think, but I can’t remember him.”