; and if she got any kind of notion that
we were wise about her pet schemes I reckon you and I would very soon
be in the Bosporus.'

This was all very well; but what was going to happen if the two of us
were bundled off to Baghdad with instructions to wash away the British?
Our time was getting pretty short, and I doubted if we could spin out
more than three days more in Constantinople. I felt just as I had felt
with Stumm that last night when I was about to be packed off to Cairo
and saw no way of avoiding it. Even Blenkiron was getting anxious. He
played Patience incessantly, and was disinclined to talk. I tried to
find out something from the servants, but they either knew nothing or
wouldn't speak--the former, I think. I kept my eyes lifting, too, as I
walked about the streets, but there was no sign anywhere of the skin
coats or the weird stringed instruments. The whole Company of the Rosy
Hours seemed to have melted into the air, and I began to wonder if they
had ever existed.

Anxiety made me restless, and restlessness made me want exercise. It
was no good walking about the city. The weather had become foul again,
and I was sick of the smells and the squalor and the flea-bitten
crowds. So Blenkiron and I got horses, Turkish cavalry mounts with
heads like trees, and went out through the suburbs into the open
country.

It was a grey drizzling afternoon, with the beginnings of a sea fog
which hid the Asiatic shores of the straits. It wasn't easy to find
open ground for a gallop, for there were endless small patches of
cultivation and the gardens of country houses. We kept on the high
land above the sea, and when we reached a bit of downland came on
squads of Turkish soldiers digging trenches. Whenever we let the
horses go we had to pull up sharp for a digging party or a stretch of
barbed wire. Coils of the beastly thing were lying loose everywhere,
and Blenkiron nearly took a nasty toss over one. Then we were always
being stopped by sentries and having to show our passes. Still the
ride did us good and shook up our livers, and by the time we turned for
home I was feeling more like a white man.

We jogged back in the short winter twilight, past the wooded grounds of
white villas, held up every few minutes by transport-wagons and
companies of soldiers. The rain had come on in real earnest, and it
was two very bedraggled horsemen that crawled along the muddy lanes.
As we passed one villa, shut in by a