“Nothing else, now, I think.  If I could see you again some time, I’d like to ask—­”

“My mission is to serve,” answered the other, caressing the moustache with a deft hand.  “Anything I can do for you, any time, command me.”

The Countess appeared from between the curtains.

“Was the conditions right?” she asked.

“They have been, at least so far,” replied the professor crisply, with a side-glance at Bean who seemed on the point of leaving.

“Say, friend, I guess you’re forgetting something, ain’t you?” demanded the Countess archly.

And Bean perceived that he had indeed forgotten something.  He rectified the oversight with blushing apologies, while the professor inspected the mantel ornaments with an absent air.  What was twenty dollars to a king and a sire of kings?  He bowed himself from the room.

They listened until the hall door closed.

“There’s yours, Ed. You earned it all right, I’ll say that.  My! don’t I wish I was up on that dope.”

“You were the wise lady to send for me, Lizzie.  You’d have killed him off right here.  As it is, he’ll come back.  He’s a clerk somewhere, drawing twenty-five a week or so.  He ought to give up at least five of it every week; cigarette money, anyway.  Anything loose in the house?”

“They’s a couple bottles beer in the icebox.  Gee! ain’t he good, though!  If he only had the roll some has!”

* * * * *

In his little room far up under the hunched shoulders of the house, Bunker Bean sat reviewing his Karmic past.  Over parts of it he shuddered.  That crafty Venetian plotting to kill, trifling wickedly with the inlaid dagger; the brutal Roman, ruling by fear, cutting off heads!  And the blind poet!  He would rather be Napoleon than a blind poet, if you came down to that.  But the king, wise, humane, handsome, masterly, with a princess of rare beauty from Mesopotamia to be the mother of his three lovely children.  That was a dazzling vision to behold, a life sane and proper, abounding in majesty both moral and material.

He sought to live over his long and peaceful but brilliant reign.  Then he dwelt on his death and burial.  They had made a mummy of him, of course.  Somewhere that very night, at that very instant, his lifeless form reposed beneath the desert sands.  Perhaps the face had changed but little during the centuries.  He, Bunker Bean, lay there in royal robes, hands folded upon his breast, as lamenting subjects had left him.

And what did it mean to him now?  He thought he saw.  As King Ram-tah he had been too peaceful.  For all his stern and kingly bearing might he not have been a little timid—­afraid of people now and then?  And the Karmic law had swept him on and on into lives that demanded violence, the Roman warrior, the Venetian plotter, the Corsican usurper!

He saw that he must have completed one of those vast Karmic cycles.  What he had supposed to be timidity was a natural reaction from Napoleonic bravado.  Now he had finished the circle and was ready to become again his kingly self, his Ram-tah self—­able, reliant, fearless.