Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.
"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety fiacre to the Palais—all the taxis have vanished!—I could have prayed for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up—every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'—the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule—it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,—reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to get laissez-passers." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"
"Beparr?"
Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:
"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"
"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"
So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket—fell asleep again.
"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.
"How I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"
"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.