ne that I can think of, unless----"

"Unless what, madame?"

She tapped the table with her pretty fingers, and poured me out a
second glass of port wine.

"Unless the mountain will come to Mahomet--but I guess you don't know
what that means, Britten, now do you?"

She screwed her lips up to the kissing point with this, and looked at
me so tenderly that I began to feel nervous--upon my word I did.

"Do you mean that your husband must come here, madame?"

"Of course I mean it, Britten. You must fetch him--by a trick. Now
wouldn't that be splendid--say, wouldn't it be fine? If we could
outwit them--if we could make the Emperor look foolish!"

I rubbed my chin and thought about it. There isn't much modesty in my
profession, but the idea of getting up against a policeman so far from
my humble home somehow put the brake on, and I found myself misfiring
like one o'clock in spite of her pretty eyes and her red lips, and her
"take me in your arms and kiss me" look. The Croydon lot are bad
enough, but as for the beaks at Montey--well, I've heard tales of them
and to spare.

"It would be fine, madame, if we could do it," said I at last; "but
between talking of it here in this hotel and crossing the frontier----"

"Oh," she cried, interrupting me almost angrily--and she has the devil
of a temper--"oh, there's no difficulty, Britten. Just drive to the
Hermitage after my husband has dined to-morrow night, and say that if
he wants the news of Madame Clara, you can take him where he will get
it. Don't you see, Clara is one of my pet names. He'll understand in
a moment, and you can drive him to this hotel. Are you afraid to do
that, Britten?"

Of course I wasn't afraid, and she knew it. It was nothing to me
anyway, and I could always plead that I was her servant and an
Englishman, and didn't care a damn for this particular Emperor or any
other. None the less, if she hadn't smiled upon me as she did at that
particular moment--smiled like a daffy-down-dilly in April, and
squeezed my hand as soft as June roses, which the same appeared to be
done by accident, I might have left it alone, after all. As it was, I
had set off at seven o'clock on the following evening, and at a quarter
past nine I was asking at the Hermitage for Count Joseph, just as full
of the story I had to tell as a history-book of kings.

A black and white _maitre d'hotel_, picked out with gold, replied to
this, and after talking to half a dozen wai