“Walk in, walk right in, Mr.—er—”
“Tracy—Howard Tracy.”
“Tracy—thanks—walk right in, you’re expected.”
Tracy entered, considerably puzzled, and said:
“Expected? I think there must be some mistake.”
“Oh, I judge not,” said Sellers, who—noticing that Hawkins had arrived, gave him a sidewise glance intended to call his close attention to a dramatic effect which he was proposing to produce by his next remark. Then he said, slowly and impressively—“I am—You Know Who.”
To the astonishment of both conspirators the remark produced no dramatic effect at all; for the new-comer responded with a quite innocent and unembarrassed air—
“No, pardon me. I don’t know who you are. I only suppose—but no doubt correctly—that you are the gentleman whose title is on the doorplate.”
“Right, quite right—sit down, pray sit down.” The earl was rattled, thrown off his bearings, his head was in a whirl. Then he noticed Hawkins standing apart and staring idiotically at what to him was the apparition of a defunct man, and a new idea was born to him. He said to Tracy briskly:
“But a thousand pardons, dear sir, I am forgetting courtesies due to a guest and stranger. Let me introduce my friend General Hawkins—General Hawkins, our new Senator—Senator from the latest and grandest addition to the radiant galaxy of sovereign States, Cherokee Strip”—(to himself, “that name will shrivel him up!”—but it didn’t, in the least, and the Colonel resumed the introduction piteously disheartened and amazed),—“Senator Hawkins, Mr. Howard Tracy, of—er—”