“Wise letter!” (Mrs. Cornock-Campbell went back to the piano. None but Rimsky-Korsakov could describe her sensations.) “He evidently knows how to manage you. Do you ever bet, John? I will bet you five rupees I know what’s next!”
John McGregor drew a five-rupee note from his pocket and laid it on the piano. Mrs. Cornock-Campbell began playing. Dawa Tsering, his head to one side like a bird’s, watched her fingers, listening intently.
“There are devils inside the machine,” he said after a while. “Give me my knife, Ommonee, and let me go.”
But Ommony, pacing the floor, both hands behind him, frowning, took no notice of any one. He was away off in a realm of conjecture of his own.
“Remember: I stand to lose five dibs!” McGregor remarked at the end of five minutes. “Suppose you put me out of agony. I’m Scots, you know!”
“Damn!” Ommony exclaimed. “Why can’t he take me into his confidence? I hate to suspect a man. Pen and ink anywhere?”
“I lose,” said Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, nodding toward a gilt-and-ivory writing desk against the wall. “Take back your five rupees, John. You’ll find a five of mine being used as a book-mark in one of those volumes of Walter Pater on the shelf. Put something in its place.”
McGregor paid himself. Ommony at the desk tore up sheet after sheet of paper, chuckled at last, and wrote a final draft. “There, that should do. That’s obscure enough. That hoists him with his own petard. Why don’t women ever have clean blotting-paper?”
He showed what he had written to McGregor, who read it aloud, Mrs. Cornock-Campbell playing very softly while she listened.
“To the holy Lama Tsiang Samdup,