“But it does one good,” said he. Triona entered with the tray, and administered whisky and soda to his guest. “There! When you’ve drunk it you’ll be ready to come to the Magical Isles with us, where the Lady of Ladies awaits you in an enchanted valley, with hybiscus in her hair.” The talk grew light, drifted inevitably into the details of their projected wanderings. The evening ended pleasantly. Olivia bade Olifant farewell, promising, as he would not go in search of her himself, to bring him back the perfect lady of the hybiscus crown. Triona accompanied him to the landing; and, while they stood awaiting the lift, Olifant said casually: “I suppose you’ve got your passports?” “Passports?” The young man knitted his brow in some surprise. “Why, of course. That’s to say, I’ve not bothered about them yet, but they’ll be all right. Why do you ask?” “You’re Russian subjects. There may be difficulties. If there are, I know a man in the Foreign Office who may be of help.” The lift rose and the gates clashed open, and the attendant came out. “Thanks very much,” said Triona. “It’s awfully good of you.” They shook hands, wished each other God-speed, and the cage went down, leaving Triona alone on the landing, gaping across the well of the lift. He was aroused from a semi-stupor by Olivia’s voice at the flat door. “What on earth are you doing, darling?” He realized that he must have been there some appreciable time. He turned with a laugh. “I was interested in the mechanism of the lift; it has so many possibilities in fiction.” She laughed. “Think of them to-morrow. It’s time for good little novelists to go to bed.” But that night, while Olivia, blissfully unconscious of trouble, slept the happy sleep of innocence Alexis Triona did not close an eye. Passports! He had not given them a thought. Any decent person was entitled to a passport. In the plenitude of his English content he had forgotten his fictitious Russian citizenship. To attest or even to support this claim there was no creature on God’s earth. The details of his story of the torpedoed Swedish timber boat in which he had taken refuge would not bear official examination. Application for passport under the name of Alexis Triona, soi-disant Russian subject, would involve an investigation leading to inevitable exposure. His civic status was that of John Briggs, late naval rating. He had all his papers jealously locked up, together with the little black notebook, in his despatch case. As John Briggs, British subject, he was freeman of the civilized world. But John Briggs was dead and done for. It was impossible to wander over the globe as Alexis Triona with a passport bearing the name of John Briggs. He would be held up and turned back at any frontier. And it was beyond his power of deception to induce Olivia to travel with him round the world under the incognito of Mrs. John Briggs.