"I may have made an impression, but certainly not a ten-strike," he
thought to himself, as he folded up the missive and put it into the most
sacred compartment of his Russia-leather pocketbook, along with the
letter of credit.
"I fear me that the incident is closed," he said. "I would stay here one
year if I thought there was a chance of seeing her again, but if she
wants me to fly I guess I had better fly."
That evening, after an earnest controversy with the manager over a very
complicated bill, studded with "extras," Mr. Alexander H. Pike,
accompanied by dragoman, leather trunks, hat-boxes and hold-alls, drove
away to the transcontinenta express, and slept soundly while crossing
the dangerous frontier.
Possibly he would not have slept so soundly if he had known that at four
o'clock that afternoon the Princess Kalora had been idling her time in
the palace garden, walking back and forth near the high wall.
She had told him not to come, and of course he would not come. No one
could be so audacious and foolhardy as to invite destruction after being
solemnly warned--and yet, if he _did_ come, she wanted to be there to
speak to him again and rebuke him and tell him not to come a third time.
She went back to her apartment much relieved and intensely disappointed.
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