THE MASQUERADER






I

Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound
together by results, marked the night of January the
twenty-third. On that night the blackest fog within a four
years' memory fell upon certain portions of London, and also
on that night came the first announcement of the border
risings against the Persian government in the province of
Khorasan the announcement that, speculated upon, even smiled
at, at the time, assumed such significance in the light of
after events.

At eight o'clock the news spread through the House of Commons;
but at nine men in the inner lobbies were gossiping, not so
much upon how far Russia, while ostensibly upholding the Shah,
had pulled the strings by which the insurgents danced, as upon
the manner in which the 'St. Geotge's Gazette', the Tory
evening newspaper, had seized upon the incident and shaken it
in the faces of the government.

More than once before, Lakely--the owner and editor of the
'St. George's'--had stepped outside the decorous circle of
tradition and taken a plunge into modern journalism, but