'm very bad in it. You must come around to supper, and tell
me where I'm bad in it, and we will talk it over. You coming, Stuart?"
"My dear old man," said Stuart, reproachfully. "Of course I am. I've had
my seats for the last three weeks. Do you suppose I could miss hearing
you mispronounce all the Hindostanee I've taught you?"
"Well, good-night then," said the actor, waving his hand to his friends
as he moved away. "'We, who are about to die, salute you!'"
"Good luck to you," said Sloane, holding up his glass. "To the Fool and
His Money," he laughed. He turned to the table again, and sounded the
bell for the waiter. "Now let's send him a telegram and wish him
success, and all sign it," he said, "and don't you fellows tell him that
I wasn't in front to-night. I've got to go to a dinner the Travellers'
Club are giving me." There was a protesting chorus of remonstrance. "Oh,
I don't like it any better than you do," said Sloane, "but I'll get away
early and join you before the play's over. No one in the Travellers'
Club, you see, has ever travelled farther from New York than London or
the Riviera, and so when a member starts for Abyssinia they give him a
dinner, and he has to take himself very seriously indeed, and cry with
Seldon, 'I who am about to die, salute you.' If that man there was any
use," he added, interrupting himself and pointing with his glass at
Stuart, "he'd pack up his things to-night and come with me."
"Oh, don't urge him," remonstrated Weimer, who had travelled all over
the world in imagination, with the aid of globes and maps, but never had
got any farther from home than Montreal. "We can't spare Stuart. He has
to stop here and invent a preliminary marriage state, so that if he
finds he doesn't like a girl, he can leave her before it is too late."
"You sail at seven, I believe, and from Hoboken, don't you?" asked
Stuart undisturbed. "If you'll start at eleven from the New York side, I
think I'll go with you, but I hate getting up early; and then you see--I
know what dangers lurk in Abyssinia, but who could tell what might not
happen to him in Hoboken?"
When Stuart returned to his room, he found a large package set upright
in an armchair and enveloped by many wrappings; but the handwriting on
the outside told him at once from whom it came and what it might be, and
he pounced upon it eagerly and tore it from its covers. The photograph
was a very large one, and the likeness to the original so adm
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