"That I warrant we shall!" the elder traveller moaned to himself distractedly. Once more they bowed low, and then followed the Governor down a winding staircase to the Imperial Dungeon, which they found to be lined with coloured marble, lighted from the roof, and splendidly though not luxuriously furnished with a bench of polished malachite. "I trust you will not delay the calculation," the Governor said, ushering them in with much ceremony. "I have known great inconvenience--great and serious inconvenience--result to those unhappy ones who have delayed to execute the commands of Her Radiancy! And on this occasion she is resolute: she says the thing must and shall be done: and she has ordered up ten thousand additional bamboos!" With these words he left them, and they heard him lock and bar the door on the outside. "I told you how it would end!" moaned the elder traveller, wringing his hands, and quite forgetting in his anguish that he had himself proposed the expedition, and had never predicted anything of the sort. "Oh that we were well out of this miserable business!" "Courage!" cried the younger cheerily. "_Hæc olim meminisse juvabit!_ The end of all this will be glory!" "Glory without the L!" was all the poor old man could say, as he rocked himself to and fro on the malachite bench. "Glory without the L!" FOOTNOTE: [Footnote A: "_Maskee_," in Pigeon-English, means "_without_."] KNOT VII. PETTY CASH. "Base is the slave that pays." "Aunt Mattie!" "My child?" "_Would_ you mind writing it down at once? I shall be quite _certain_ to forget it if you don't!" "My dear, we really must wait till the cab stops. How can I possibly write anything in the midst of all this jolting?" "But _really_ I shall be forgetting it!" Clara's voice took the plaintive tone that her aunt never knew how to resist, and with a sigh the old lady drew forth her ivory tablets and prepared to record the amount that Clara had just spent at the confectioner's shop. Her expenditure was always made out of her aunt's purse, but the poor girl knew, by bitter experience, that sooner or later "Mad Mathesis" would expect an exact account of every penny that had gone, and she waited, with ill-concealed impatience, while the old lady turned the tablets over and over, till she had found the one headed "PETTY CASH." "Here's the place," she said at last, "and here we have yesterday's luncheon duly entered. _One glass lemonade_ (Why can't you drink water, like me?) _three sandwiches_ (They never put in half mustard enough. I told the young woman so, to her face; and she tossed her head--like her impudence!) _and seven biscuits_. _Total one-and-two-pence._ Well, now for to-day's?" "One glass of lemonade----" Clara was beginning to say, when suddenly the cab drew up, and a courteous railway-porter was handing out the bewildered girl before she had had time to finish her sentence.