“You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of Yaque,” he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the democracy with hereditary titles.

The men stared and spoke almost together.

“We are,” they said promptly.

“She is not here,” explained St. George, “but I have attended to some affairs for her.  Will you come with me to my apartment where we may be alone?”

The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.

“Pardon,” said one, “if we may be quite assured that this is Miss Holland’s friend to whom we speak—­”

St. George hesitated.  The hall-boy listened with an air of polite concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the passers-by.  Suddenly St. George’s face lighted and he went swiftly through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper—­the fragment that had lain that morning on the floor of the prince’s deserted apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque.  It was the strangers’ turn to regard him with amazement.  Immediately, to St. George’s utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and pronounced together: 

“Pardon, adon!”

“My name is St. George,” he assured them, “and let’s get into a cab.”

They followed him without demur.

St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them—­lean lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great repose.  They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley Reformatory—­as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way rhymed with a word which he did not know.

“What is it,” St. George asked as they rolled away, “what is it that you have come to tell Miss Holland?”

Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two rows of exceptionally white teeth.

“May we not know, adon,” asked the man respectfully, “whether the prince has given her his news?  And if the prince is still in your land?”

“The prince’s servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and has got herself locked up,” St. George imparted without hesitation.

An exclamation of horror broke from both men.

“To stab—­to kill!” they cried.

“Quite so,” said St. George, “and the prince, upon being discovered, disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her friends started an hour ago for Yaque.”

“That is well, that is well!” cried the little man, nodding, and momentarily hesitated; “but yet his news—­what news, adon, has he told her?”

For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.

“Ah, well now, what news had he?” he asked briefly.

The men answered readily.

“Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father, the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the hereditary throne of Yaque.”