“My august master cannot speak to any one but the great scholar whom he came here to see. He soon returns to his retirement in his palace in the Karakorum Mountains. And he never will emerge thence!” solemnly said the Moonshee, adding in a whisper: “He may, by the grace of Buddha, be re-incarnated as the Dalai-Lama. He springs from the loins of kings. I dare not break in upon his awful silence.” The Moonshee’s significant gesture of drawing a hand across his own brown throat had silenced the pushing American professor. “By hokey!” he groaned, “it is hard to have to play second fiddle to this purblind old Scotchman.” Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his “emergent” periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. “I must be content to tap old Fraser when he comes back from London with that embarrassing lump of beauty, his millionaire niece. She would make a fitting spouse for this Prince Djiddin, for she never speaks a word--at least to me. And this swell Prince, who comes ‘only one in a box,’ gets the same ‘frozen hand.’ Funny girl, that. But I must yield to old Fraser’s moods.” Alaric Hobbs then descended to the tap-room and instructed the pretty barmaid in the manufacture of his own favorite “cocktail,” an American drink of surpassing fierceness and “innate power,” which had once caused “Bald-headed Wolf,” a Kiowa chieftain, to slay his favorite squaw, scalp a peace commissioner, and chase a fat army paymaster till he died of fright in his ambulance, after Alaric Hobbes had incautiously left a bottle of this “red-eye” mixture with his aboriginal host on one of the “exploring tours.” A powerful disturbing agent, the American cocktail! But for all Miss Nadine Johnstone’s seeming aversion to men, and in spite of Prince Djiddin’s inability to utter a word of any jargon save ninety-five degree Thibetan, “far above proof,” on this very morning while the “Moonshee” was transcribing under the watchful eyes of the excited Andrew Fraser the disclosures of the evening before, the young millionairess was “getting on” very well in exhibiting the glories of the tropical garden to the august tourist from the lacustrine Himalayas. Jules Victor adroitly busied the maid whom Janet Fairbarn had dispatched to “play propriety,” and the other London girl had quietly stolen away to her own last rendezvous with her mysterious London lover, “Mr. Joseph Smith,” otherwise “Jack Blunt, Esq., of the Swell Mob of the Thames.”