"Talking before and afterward!"
"Excellent! If only every one remembered that! Did it ever occur to you how the problem might be reversed ?"
"Sir?"
"There might one day be a letter for the Princess Yasmini that, as her friend, you ought to make sure should reach her."
"I'd take a letter from you to her, sir, if that's your meaning."
Sir Roland Samson, K. C. S. I., looked properly shocked.
There are few things so appalling as the abruptness with which members of the lower orders divest diplomacy's kernel of its decorative outer shell. "What I meant is—ah—" He set his monocle, and stared as if Tripe were an insect on a pin-point. "Since you admit you're in the business of intriguing for the princess, no doubt you carry letters to, as well as from her, and hold your tongue about that too?"
"If I should deliver letters they'd be secret or they'd have gone through the mail. I'd risk my job each time I did it. Would I risk it worse by talking? Once the maharajah heard a whisper—"
"Well—I'll be careful not to drop a hint to his highness. As you say, it might imperil your job. And, ah—" (again the monocle,) "—the initials r. s.— in small letters, not capitals, in the bottom left-hand corner of a small white envelope would—ah—you understand?—you'd see that she received it, eh?"
Tom Tripe bridled visibly. Neither the implied threat nor the proposal to make use of him without acknowledging the service afterward, escaped him. Samson, who believed among other things in keeping all inferiors thoroughly in their place decided on the instant to rub home the lesson while it smarted.