“Is your mistress at home?” he asked.

“Miss Edith has gone to London for two days, sir,” the girl announced.  “The professor is in his study, sir.”

Burton stood quite still for a moment.  It was absurd that his heart should be so suddenly heavy, that all the spring and buoyancy should have gone out of life!  For the first time he realized the direction in which his thoughts had been travelling since he had left his rooms an hour ago.  He had to remind himself that it was the professor whom he had come to see.

Mr. Cowper received him graciously, if a little vaguely.  Burton wasted no time, however, in announcing the nature of his errand.  Directly he produced the sheets, the professor became interested.  The faint odor which seemed shaken out from them into the room stimulated his curiosity.  He sniffed at it with great content.

“Strange,” he remarked, “very strange.  I haven’t smelt that perfume since I was with the excavators at Chaldea.  A real Oriental flavor, young man, about your manuscript.”

“There is very little of it,” Burton said,—­“just a page or so which apparently the writer never had time to finish.  The sheets came into my hands in rather a curious way, and I should very much like to have an exact translation of them.  I don’t even know what the language is.  I thought, perhaps, that you might be able to help me.  I will explain to you later, if you will allow me, the exact nature of my interest in them.”

Mr. Cowper took the pages into his hand with a benevolent smile.  At the first glance, however, his expression changed.  It was obvious that he was greatly interested.  It was obvious, also, that he was correspondingly surprised.

“My dear young man,” he exclaimed, “my dear Mr.—­Mr. Burton—­why, this is wonderful!  Where did you get these sheets, do you say?  Are you honestly telling me that they were written within the last thousand years?”

“Without a doubt,” Burton replied.  “They were written in London, a few months ago.”

Mr. Cowper was already busy surrounding himself with strange-looking volumes.  His face displayed the utmost enthusiasm in his task.

“It is most amazing, this,” he declared, drawing a chair up to the table.  “These sheets are written in a language which has been dead as a medium of actual intercourse for over two thousand years.  You meet with it sometimes in old Egyptian manuscripts.  There was a monastery somewhere near the excavations which I had the honor to conduct in Syria, where an ancient prayer-book contained several prayers in this language.  Literally I cannot translate this for you; actually I will.  I can get at the sense—­I can get at the sense quite well.  But if one could only find the man who wrote it!  He is the man I should like to see, Mr. Burton.  If the pages were written so recently, where is the writer?”

“He is dead,” Burton replied.

Mr. Cowper sighed.