Diary of a Drug Fiend

CHAPTER X THE BUBBLE BURSTS WE felt that our troubles were over when a tall bronzed Englishman in flannels and a Panama sauntered into the room. We sprang instinctively to our feet, but he took no notice beyond looking at us out of the tail of. his eye, and twisting his mouth into a curious little com- promise between a smile and a query. The clerk bowed him at once into an inner room. We waited and waited. I couldn’t understand at all what they could have been talking about in there for so long. _ But at last the soldier at the door beckoned us in. The vice-consul was sitting on a sofa in the background. With his head on one side, he shot a keen fixed glance out of his languid eyes, and bit his thumbnail persis- tently, as if in a state of extreme nervous perplexity. I was swept by a feeling of complete humiliation. It was a transitory feverish flush; and it left me more exhausted than ever. The commissario swung his chair around to our Saviour, and said something which evidently meant, “‘ Please open fire.”’ “‘ I’m the vice-consul here,” he said. ‘‘ I understand that you claim to be Sir Peter and Lady Pendragon.” “ That’s who we are,” I replied, with a pitiful attempt at jauntiness. ‘You'll excuse me, I’m sure,” he said, “if I say that—to the eyes of the average Italian official—you don’t precisely look the part. Have you your passports?” The mere presence of an English gentleman had a good effect in pulling me together. 128