“What are you up to now?” “I tell Mr. George Lauriston my brother has taken rooms at 36, Mary Street; I ask him to call. I tell him to go straight in, upstairs to the first floor, and that the first door is my brother’s. He won’t find him naturally, because he will not be there; so he’ll inevitably see the lady, and we’ll pump him afterwards, as to what she looked like, what she said, how she spoke.” “Massey, you’re off your head. There’d be a deuce of a row. Scheherazade would scream, brown Windsor would draw his scimitar, there’d be a scrimmage on the stairs, and what would happen to you and me when Lauriston got back would be better imagined than described.” “By Jove, if I could find out who she is I’d think it cheap at a black eye.” “I shouldn’t.” Dicky being the weaker if the wiser, however, gave way in the end, and George Lauriston duly received and accepted the invitation to call at 36, Mary Street, on a certain evening to see Massey’s brother, a clever and rising engineer, whom Lauriston had met and was anxious to meet again. As the day of the appointment drew near, both of the conspirators, who had grown more lax in their attendance at the Oriental warehouse as repeated disappointments told upon their energy, felt qualms as to Lauriston’s action when he should have discovered the trick played upon him; and at last Massey told Dicky that he had an invitation up the river which would take him out of town on the evening named, and Dicky confessed in reply that he had got leave to go down to Brighton that afternoon. “It will be just as much fun to hear what he says afterwards as it would be to watch him go in from the little shop on the other side of the way, as we proposed,” said Massey. “And he’ll have cooled down a bit before he sees us, so that if anything comes of it he won’t be able to rush off red-hot and do for us,” added Dicky, more honestly. “I suppose old brown Windsor won’t stick him with a yataghan, or anything of that sort if he really does meet the lady,” he continued in a low and lugubrious voice. “You see, I’m sure the black men guess what we’re after, spending all our time and money over tea-trays and idols as we’ve done lately. And it would be rather hard if they were to think poor Lauriston was in it, only cheekier than the rest of us, and were to make him into a curry for what we’ve done.” “Pooh, nonsense, Lauriston can take care of himself as well as anybody. He isn’t much of a soldier if he won’t think a back-hander over the staircase a small enough price to pay for the sight of a houri handsome enough for a Sultan’s harem.” “But, Massey, he’s half a Scotchman. He wouldn’t look twice at a woman who hadn’t raw bones and red hair, and not at her if she wasn’t well provided with the bawbees,” suggested Dicky in the pride of his knowledge of different phases of human nature. “All the better for us then; he’ll think it’s a mistake and won’t guess what we’ve been up to.”