CHAPTER X
HIS EXCELLENCY ORMÛZ KHÂN
THE city clocks were chiming the hour of ten on the following morning when a page from the Savoy approached the shop of Mr. Jarvis, bootmaker, which is situated at no great distance from the hotel. The impudent face of the small boy wore an expression of serio-comic fright as he pushed open the door and entered the shop.
Jarvis, the bootmaker, belonged to a rapidly disappearing class of British tradesmen. He truckled to no one, but took an artistic pride in his own handiwork, criticism from a layman merely provoking a scornful anger which had lost Jarvis many good customers.
He was engaged, at the moment of the page's entrance, in a little fitting room at the back of his cramped premises, but through the doorway the boy could see the red, bespectacled face with its fringe of bristling white beard, in which he detected all the tokens of brewing storm. He whistled softly in self-sympathy.
"Yes, sir," Jarvis was saying to an invisible patron, "it's a welcome sight to see a real Englishman walk
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