“Ha-ha!  Very profoundly philosophic!  I dare wager you’ve carried her letters at least a dozen times—­now come.”

Again Tom Tripe puffed out his cheeks and struck an attitude.

“Men don’t get hanged for murder, sir.”

“For what, then?”

“Talking before and afterward!”

“Excellent!  If only every one remembered that!  Did it ever occur to you how the problem might be reversed ?”

“Sir?”

“There might one day be a letter for the Princess Yasmini that, as her friend, you ought to make sure should reach her.”

“I’d take a letter from you to her, sir, if that’s your meaning.”

Sir Roland Samson, K. C. S. I., looked properly shocked.

There are few things so appalling as the abruptness with which members of the lower orders divest diplomacy’s kernel of its decorative outer shell.  “What I meant is—­ah—­” He set his monocle, and stared as if Tripe were an insect on a pin-point.  “Since you admit you’re in the business of intriguing for the princess, no doubt you carry letters to, as well as from her, and hold your tongue about that too?”

“If I should deliver letters they’d be secret or they’d have gone through the mail.  I’d risk my job each time I did it.  Would I risk it worse by talking?  Once the maharajah heard a whisper—­”

“Well—­I’ll be careful not to drop a hint to his highness.  As you say, it might imperil your job.  And, ah—­” (again the monocle,) “—­the initials r. s.—­ in small letters, not capitals, in the bottom left-hand corner of a small white envelope would—­ah—­you understand?—­you’d see that she received it, eh?”

Tom Tripe bridled visibly.  Neither the implied threat nor the proposal to make use of him without acknowledging the service afterward, escaped him.  Samson, who believed among other things in keeping all inferiors thoroughly in their place decided on the instant to rub home the lesson while it smarted.

“You’d find it profitable.  You’d be paid whatever the situation called for.  You needn’t doubt that.”

Tess, talking with a group of guests some little distance off, observed a look of battle in Tom Tripe’s eye, and smiled two seconds later as the commissioner let fall his monocle.  Two things she was certain of at once:  Tom Tripe would tell her at the first opportunity exactly what had happened, and Samson would lie about it glibly if provoked.  She promised herself she would provoke him.  As a matter of fact Tom gave her two or three versions afterward of what his words had been, their grandeur increasing as imagination flourished in the comfortable warmth of confidence.  But the first account came from a fresh memory: 

“No money you’ll ever touch would buy my dog’s silence, let alone mine, sir!  If you’ve a letter for the princess, send it along and I’ll see she gets it.  If she cares to answer it, I’ll see the answer reaches you.  As for dropping hints to the maharajah about my doing little services for the princess,—­a gentleman’s a gentleman, and don’t need instruction—­ nor advice from me.  If I was out of a job tomorrow I’d still be a man on two feet, to be met as such.”