"Bet you a pony they want our photographs for the Morning Mirror."
I rose from the table and took a turn in the kitchen garden. When your heart is fairly in your boots, the society of your peers has its drawbacks.
At half-past two, punctual to the minute, the toot of the car was heard at the hall door. Miss Lucinda received a parting salute and an illicit box of chocolates which consoled her immensely for the temporary loss—permanent perhaps in the case of one—of both her parents.
I confess to being one of those weak mortals who on a journey is invariably accompanied by the consciousness of having left something undone or having omitted to pack some unremembered but quite indispensable necessary. Three-fourths of the way to the station I was haunted with this feeling in a more acute form than usual, and then quite suddenly, with a spasm of perverse joy, it occurred to me that I had left the burglar's foe in its secret receptacle.
"Thank God for that!" was the pious hyperbole which ascended to heaven.
At the station we were not the first to arrive on the scene, although there was a full quarter of an hour in hand. Fitz in a fur overcoat of some pretensions bore a look of collected importance which was quite in keeping with the rôle he had to fill.
"Tickets are taken," said he, "and carriage reserved for five."
In front of the bookstall a yellow newsbill displayed the contents of a London evening paper, issued at noon. "The Attempt on the Life of the King of Illyria. Latest Details."
"Clumsy fools," said the son-in-law of Ferdinand the Twelfth, gloomily. "They seem to have bungled the business badly, but they bungle everything in Illyria."
"His Excellency, the Ambassador, would appear to be an exception to the general rule."