And with a simper I left my gallant and dapper cavalier to pay the bill. CHAPTER X RECAPTURED At five o'clock one morning Mlle. Josephine received a staggering note from the Russian Colonel to say that he had had to leave at a moment's notice for the Caucasus, under a Turkish guard, and that there was no prospect at all of his taking his dear Josephine with him. Thus my plan had failed. It was not the Colonel's fault, but it was annoying all the same. I had wasted both time and money, provisions and opportunities, and now I had to begin all over again. I decided that I would not continue in my disguise as a girl. It was too nerve-racking to begin with; and also, as a girl, I could not go down myself to the docks and arrange matters at first hand. I felt I must do something for myself. During the month that had elapsed Robin had been recaptured, other officers had escaped, the whole course of the war was changing, and here was I still _embusque_ in Constantinople. Something must be done, and, as usual, my good angel did it for me. . . . She bought me a small upturned moustache, spectacles, hair-dye, a second-hand suit, a stained white waistcoat which I ornamented with a large nickel gilt watch chain, a pair of old elastic-sided boots (price L7), an ebony cane with a silver top, and a bowler hat which I perched rakishly askew. I was a Hungarian mechanic, out of a job. I had lost my place at the munition factory near San Stefano. But I was not down-hearted. My nails were oily and my antecedents doubtful, but I drank my beer and smoked my cigars and looked on life brightly through my spectacles. I did not avoid the Boche--in fact, I frequently drank beer with him. The non-Latin races are not inquisitive as a rule. They cared little whether I was Swiss or Dutch or Hungarian, and I frequently claimed all three nationalities. They did not even think it odd when, on one occasion, I said that I had been born in Scandinavia and later that I was a naturalised Hungarian, and later again (when a Jewish gentleman with military boots joined us, whom I recognised to be a Government informer, paid to pick up information) that I was really of Russian parentage and that I had a passport to this effect (which I showed to the company present) signed by Djevad Bey, the military commandant of Constantinople, permitting me to proceed to Russia and ordering that every facility should be given to me at the custom-house. This forged passport was a source of perplexity to me at the time, and later it was to be the cause of great discomfort. I had bought it for ten pounds from the gentleman whose pumicestone engraving die reposed at the bottom of the cistern. It was an ornate affair, duly stamped, and sealed, and signed with a Turkish flourish. But I could not bring myself to believe that it would get me through the passport office, the _douane_, and the medical station at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Some hitch would certainly have occurred.