"I don't know what they'll do, although I think I know what they'll want to do," she replied, quickly. "But somehow I managed to lose my other little pepper-box this morning. Where it's gone to or who's got it I don't know, so I got this instead. It's a pretty thing," she went on, playing with it as a woman might toy with a jewel, "seven-shooter and magazine action. If you hold the trigger back after you've fired the first shot, it shoots the other six in about three seconds."
"A very handy thing in a tight corner, I should say," said Hardress, smiling at her over the top of his tea-cup, "and in such hands I should think a very ugly thing to face."
Adelaide's fingers were itching to take out the revolver and shoot both of them when she saw the all-meaning glance which passed between them while he spoke, but instead of that she raised her tea-cup and touched it with her pretty lips, and as she put the cup down she said, with the sweetest of smiles, to the president:
"I think it is quite charming of you, Mr President, to ask the leaders of the expedition to dinner in such a friendly way. Surely it is not always usual to ask the enemy within the gates?"
"We have no enemies, marquise," he replied, gravely, "except those who stand in the way of our commercial undertaking, and with them, of course, business is business, and there is no sentiment in that. Of course we have a pretty good idea why these two expeditions have come to the magnetic pole instead of trying to get to the North Pole, but we've not been lying awake at nights worrying about that, and there's no particular reason why we shouldn't ask the scientific explorers to dinner. All the same, if they happen to have come with the idea that they have a better right to these works than we have, and they want any trouble—why, they can have it."
"And," added Hardress, still looking across at Chrysie, "I think they will find it the most extraordinary kind of trouble that mortal man ever ran up against."
"It's to be hoped," said Doctor Lamson, speaking for the first time since the little tea-party had begun, for he had been thinking hard, and every now and then raising his eyes as though to seek inspiration from Lady Olive's calm, patrician face, as calm now, on the eve of a struggle which could scarcely end without bloodshed, and might end in ruin, as it would have been in a London drawing-room—"I most sincerely hope that it will not come to actual hostilities; it would be really too awful."
"I wonder if it would be permissible for a prisoner of war to ask what would be too awful, doctor," said Sophie, looking at him with a smile which somehow made him think of a beautiful tigress he had seen in the Thiergarten in Berlin.
"The means that we should be compelled to employ in such a case to reduce those two squadrons, or expeditions, or whatever they call themselves, to something about as unsubstantial as that," replied the doctor, blowing a puff of cigarette smoke into the air.
At this moment Austin Vandel came up on to the wall, and handed a piece of paper to his father.