Captain the Honorable Anson Anstruther put up his monocle and duly answered: “I thought that you were still in Calcutta, Hawke.” There was a faint noli me tangere air in the young staff officer’s manner, and yet mere propinquity drew them together in a few minutes. With the insouciance of men bred in club and at mess, the two soldiers soon drifted into an easy chat, meeting on safe grounds. They calmly ignored the surrounding civilians, regardless of the attractions of two falcon-eyed Chicago beauties, loud of voice and brilliantly overdressed, who were guiding “Popper” and “Mommer” over the continent. These resplendent daughters of Columbia already boasted a train consisting of a French count (of a very old and shadowy regime), a singularly second-hand looking Italian marquis, a wooden-soldier figured German baron, and a sad-eyed, distant-looking Russian prince, whose bold Tartar glances rested hungrily upon both Miss “Phenie” and Miss “Genie” Forbes. The Anglo-Indians, however, calmly pursued their dinner and gossip regardless of the fact that Miss “Phenie” had violently nudged Miss “Genie,” and whispered in a stage aside: “Say, Genie, look at those two English fellows! They are something like--I bet you that they are two Lords!” The approval of the gilded Western maidens, whose father systematically assassinated a thousand porkers per diem, was lost upon the chance-met acquaintances. “I must get back to India, by hook or crook,” mused Alan Hawke, and therefore, he very delicately played his wary fish, the sybaritic young swell of the staff. Captain the Honorable Anson Anstruther’s reserve soon melted under the skillful bonhomie of the astute Alan Hawke. An easy-going patrician of the staff, he was in the magic circle of the viceroy. The heir to an inevitable fortune, and already vested with substantially stratified deposits at “Coutts” and Glyn, Carr and Glyn’s, he would have been envied by most luckless mortals the heavy balances which he always carried at “Grind-lay’s,” a fortune for any less fortunate man. He was already interested in the remarkably fetching looking young woman at Alan Hawke’s left, being a squire of dames par excellence, while Major Alan Hawke himself wondered how Anstruther had drifted so far away from the direct line of travel to London. Thawing visibly under the influence of Hawke’s gracefully modulated camaraderie, the susceptible Anstruther was attentively examining his fair neighbor in silence, while he tried vaguely to recall some story which he had once heard, quite detrimental to the cosmopolitan Major.