CHAPTER VII
Striking a simon-pure romantic note, showing, as it does, or rather tries to do, that a blade can have a soul. Also giving another glimpse of the charming young Oriental princess whom the reader has doubtless forgotten by this time.
Years later, when The Honorable Hector Wade spoke of that period of his eventful life, he would add, by way of ruminating, psychological commentary, that the home-spun self-possession in which he considered Ali Yusuf Khan's offer was really the strangest part of the whole incident.
“You musn't forget," he would add, “that I carried a chip on my shoulder and was as quick to smell offense as a mouse smells cheese. The whole sordid, miserable affair was only a few days old, and I hadn't been in London more than seven or eight hours. But you know how it is, how you don't meet people when you want to meet them, and how they seem to pop out of the nowhere when you want to avoid them. There was—what was her name? Oh, yes, Victoria de Bunsen, girl I used to dance with, and, of course, I ran into Vic at Waterloo Station. She was with Jamie Black of the Highland Light Infantry, a sort of second cousin of mine, and both cut me dead, sent me to Coventry, greeted me with an emphatic chorus of unfeigned, contemptuous silence.
“And, on the train up from Sussex, I had seen a copy of Reynolds' Weekly. They had stuck my picture
