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Oh, see those starched-up collars! Hark how their captain hollers 'Keep time! Keep time!' It's worth a thousand dollars To see those tip-collectors...." Very near now. Almost at the door. "Those upper-berth inspectors, Those Pullman porters on parade!" A dim, shapeless figure in the black of the doorway. The scrabbling of fingers on the wall. "Where are you, dammit?" said the voice, apparently addressing the electric-light switch. Jill shrank back, desperate fingers pressing deep into the back of an arm-chair. Light flashed from the wall at her side. And there, in the doorway, stood Wally Mason in his shirt-sleeves. CHAPTER XIII THE AMBASSADOR ARRIVES I In these days of rapid movement, when existence has become little more than a series of shocks of varying intensity, astonishment is the shortest-lived of all the emotions. There was an instant in which Jill looked at Wally and Wally at Jill with the eye of total amazement, and then, almost simultaneously, each began--the process was subconscious--to regard this meeting not as an isolated and inexplicable event, but as something resulting from a perfectly logical chain of circumstances. "Hullo!" said Wally. "Hullo!" said Jill. It was not a very exalted note on which to pitch the conversation, but it had the merit of giving each of them a little more time to collect themselves. "This is.... I wasn't expecting you!" said Wally. "I wasn't expecting _you_!" said Jill. There was another pause, in which Wally, apparently examining her last words and turning them over in his mind, found that they did not square with his preconceived theories. "You weren't expecting me?" "I certainly was not!" "But ... but you knew I lived here?" Jill shook her head. Wally reflected for an instant, and then put his finger, with a happy inspiration, on the very heart of the mystery. "Then how on earth did you get here?" He was glad he had asked that. The sense of unreality which had come to him in the first startling moment of seeing her and vanished under the influence of logic had returned as strong as ever. If she did not know he lived in this place, how in the name of everything uncanny had she found her way here? A momentary wonder as to whether all this was not mixed up with telepathy and mental suggestion and all that sort of thing came to him. Certainly he had been thinking of her all the time since th
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