ord,
underlined:

"To-morrow."

CHAPTER X. HIS EXCELLENCY ORMUZ KHAN

The city clocks were chiming the hour of ten on the following morning
when a page from the Savoy approached the shop of Mr. Jarvis, bootmaker,
which is situated at no great distance from the hotel. The impudent face
of the small boy wore an expression of serio-comic fright as he pushed
open the door and entered the shop.

Jarvis, the bootmaker, belonged to a rapidly disappearing class of
British tradesmen. He buckled to no one, but took an artistic pride in
his own handiwork, criticism from a layman merely provoking a scornful
anger which had lost Jarvis many good customers.

He was engaged, at the moment of the page's entrance, in a little
fitting room at the back of his cramped premises, but through the
doorway the boy could see the red, bespectacled face with its fringe of
bristling white beard, in which he detected all the tokens of brewing
storm. He whistled softly in self-sympathy.

"Yes, sir," Jarvis was saying to an invisible patron, "it's a welcome
sight to see a real Englishman walk into my shop nowadays. London isn't
London, sir, since the war, and the Strand will never be the Strand
again." He turned to his assistant, who stood beside him, bootjack in
hand. "If he sends them back again," he directed, "tell him to go to
one of the French firms in Regent Street who cater to dainty ladies." He
positively snorted with indignation, while the page, listening, whistled
again and looked down at the parcel which he carried.

"An unwelcome customer, Jarvis?" inquired the voice of the man in the
fitting room.

"Quite unwelcome," said Jarvis. "I don't want him. I have more work than
I know how to turn out. I wish he would go elsewhere. I wish--"

He paused. He had seen the page boy. The latter, having undone his
parcel, was holding out a pair of elegant, fawn-coloured shoes.

"Great Moses!" breathed Jarvis. "He's had the cheek to send them back
again!"

"His excellency--" began the page, when Jarvis snatched the shoes from
his hand and hurled them to the other end of the shop. His white beard
positively bristled.

"Tell his excellency," he shouted, "to go to the devil, with my
compliments!"

So positively ferocious was his aspect that the boy, with upraised arm,
backed hastily out into the street. Safety won: "Blimey!" exclaimed the
youth. "He's the warm goods, he is!"

He paused for several moments, staring in a kind of stupefi