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