“I regrets hexceedingly to say, sir, that one as ’as been dismissed from the Harmy’s and the Noivy’s ’op, sir, cawn’t rightly be expected to find a boith ’ere.” Routledge had a large view of the world, and a compressed notion of the personal equation, but his humor did not save him now from being stung hard and deep. “You are quite right, of course,” he said. “I’m very sorry to have intruded, and very thankful for the good time up to now. Good-night.” There was a murmur of sorrow from many feminine quarters when the great frieze coat was brought, but it was quickly silenced by the undertone of intelligence which spread like poison through the hall. The butler at the Army and Navy reception had told one of the drivers, who, turning up later at the celebration of his own guild, found the outcast there. Thus have empires fallen. Routledge walked the full distance to his lodgings. Sometimes he smiled; sometimes he found himself striding forward with mad swiftness; then he would smile again, and pull up to the pace of a leisurely gentleman enjoying the night air. Entering his stairway in Bookstalls, he just avoided stumbling over a little figure curled up asleep. His heart went out to the street-waif. Here was one, at least, in London who had no hate nor insult for him. The impulse came to carry the little one up into the warmth. Without waking, the child was placed in a big chair before the grate-fire in the lodgings upstairs. Then Routledge sat down to meditate. “This is a merry old trail--God knows I love it!” he muttered. “I have had what the good gray poet would call a night of ‘richness and variety.’... Perhaps I would be less happy did I know the breed of incubus which has fallen upon me.... I shall probably be turned out of here in the morning--perhaps be cast into stone and steel. It is strange, strange, that I, Routledge, whose business it is to tell the world the gossip of inner courts and the issue of open fields--that the point of my own fate should be buried in me before I get a look at it!... And that wondrous girl! Why did I not know her when the dust of the world had not fallen upon me; when I had not looked upon the world’s red wines--because they were red!... Routledge, old wanderer, how often has some woman arisen to save you from death--and now a woman arises to save you from your friends!” A watcher would have thought, for a long time afterward, that Routledge dozed, with the stem of a _nargileh_ between his teeth, except for the soft bubbling in the bottle and the tiny puffs of smoke at long intervals. The dawn came in, graduated from gloomy gray to the dead-white of a sunless morning.... The bell aroused him. He arose and opened the door. Jerry Cardinegh was on the stairs. SIXTH CHAPTER A GRIM AND TERRIBLE TRADITION IS TOUCHED UPON FOR THE RELATION IT BEARS TO THE TREACHERY IN INDIA