It's a bird!"

"Very good, sir."

"I'll be round at about a quarter to eight. Will that be right?"

"Admirable, sir."

"And, I say, about that soporific.... Don't overdo it. Don't go killing
the little beast."

"Oh, no, sir."

"Well," said Sam, "you can't say it's not a temptation. And you know
what you Napoleons of the Underworld are!"

CHAPTER XVII

A CROWDED NIGHT

Sec. 1

If there is one thing more than another which weighs upon the mind of a
story-teller as he chronicles the events which he has set out to
describe, it is the thought that the reader may be growing impatient
with him for straying from the main channel of his tale and devoting
himself to what are, after all, minor developments. This story, for
instance, opened with Mrs. Horace Hignett, the world-famous writer on
Theosophy, going over to America to begin a lecturing-tour; and no one
realises more keenly than I do that I have left Mrs. Hignett flat. I
have thrust that great thinker into the background and concentrated my
attention on the affairs of one who is both her mental and her moral
inferior, Samuel Marlowe. I seem at this point to see the reader--a
great brute of a fellow with beetling eyebrows and a jaw like the ram of
a battleship, the sort of fellow who is full of determination and will
stand no nonsense--rising to remark that he doesn't care what happened
to Samuel Marlowe and that what he wants to know is, how Mrs. Hignett
made out on her lecturing-tour. Did she go big in Buffalo? Did she have
'em tearing up the seats in Schenectady? Was she a riot in Chicago and a
cyclone in St. Louis? Those are the points on which he desires
information, or give him his money back.

I cannot supply the information. And, before you condemn me, let me
hastily add that the fault is not mine but that of Mrs. Hignett herself.
The fact is, she never went to Buffalo. Schenectady saw nothing of her.
She did not get within a thousand miles of Chicago, nor did she
penetrate to St. Louis. For the very morning after her son Eustace
sailed for England in the liner "Atlantic," she happened to read in the
paper one of those abridged passenger-lists which the journals of New
York are in the habit of printing, and got a nasty shock when she saw
that, among those whose society Eustace would enjoy during the voyage,
was "Miss Wilhelmina Bennett, daughter of J. Rufus Bennett of Bennett,
Mandelbaum and Co.". And within five minutes of digesting this
inf