'I wouldn't have missed it for a hundred pounds,' I answered. 'Then try another.' 'I wouldn't try another for a thousand,' I cried, fervently. That evening, at the palace, I was the heroine of the day. They toasted me in a bumper of Heidsieck's dry monopole. The men made speeches. Everybody talked gushingly of my splendid courage and my steadiness of hand. It was a brilliant shot, under such difficult circumstances. For myself, I said nothing. I pretended to look modest. I dared not confess the truth--that I never fired at all. And from that day to this I have never confessed it, till I write it down now in these confiding memoirs. [Illustration: IT'S I WHO AM THE WINNAH.] One episode cast a gloom over my ill-deserved triumph. In the course of the evening, a telegram arrived for the pea-green young man by a white-turbaned messenger. He read it, and crumpled it up carelessly in his hand. I looked inquiry. 'Yaas,' he answered, nodding. 'You're quite right. It's that! Pooah old Marmy has gone, aftah all! Ezekiel and Habakkuk have carried off his sixteen stone at last! And I don't mind telling yah now--though it was a neah thing--it's _I_ who am the winnah!' X THE ADVENTURE OF THE CROSS-EYED Q.C. The 'cold weather,' as it is humorously called, was now drawing to a close, and the young ladies in sailor hats and cambric blouses, who flock to India each autumn for the annual marriage-market, were beginning to resign themselves to a return to England--unless, of course, they had succeeded in 'catching.' So I realised that I must hurry on to Delhi and Agra, if I was not to be intercepted by the intolerable summer. When we started from Moozuffernuggar for Delhi and the East, Lord Southminster was starting for Bombay and Europe. This surprised me not a little, for he had confided to my unsympathetic ear a few nights earlier, in the Maharajah's billiard-room, that he was 'stony broke,' and must wait at Moozuffernuggar for lack of funds 'till the oof-bird laid' at his banker's in England. His conversation enlarged my vocabulary, at any rate. 'So you've managed to get away?' I exclaimed, as he dawdled up to me at the hot and dusty station. 'Yaas,' he drawled, fixing his eye-glass, and lighting a cigarette. 'I've--p'f--managed to get away. Maharaj seems to have thought--p'f--it would be cheepah in the end to pay me out than to keep me.' 'You don't mean to say he offered to lend you money?' I cried. 'No; not exactly that: _I_ offahed to borrow it.' 'From the man you call a nigger?' His smile spread broader over his face than ever. 'Well, we borrow from the Jews, yah know,' he said pleasantly, 'so why the jooce shouldn't we borrow from the heathen also? Spoiling the Egyptians, don't yah see?--the same as we used to read about in the Scripchah when we were innocent kiddies. Like marriage, quite. You borrow in haste--and repay at leisure.' He strolled off and took his seat. I was glad to get rid of him at the main line junction.