ears be soiled with so sordid a confidence?  Poor Irene! she was to have an ‘At Home’ the following afternoon.  It would have to be postponed.  Professor Lachsyrma fell to thinking of such trivial matters, contemptible in their unimportance, as we do at the terrible moments of our lives.  He wondered if they would wait dinner for him.  He often remained at his club—­the Serapeum—­to finish a discussion with some erudite antagonist.  His absence would therefore cause no alarm.  He consulted the little American clock; it had stopped.  How like America!  The only recorded instance, he would explain to Irene, of an export from that country being required—­the commodity proved inadequate.  No, that would make Irene cry. . . .  The folly of hopeless, futile thoughts jingled on.  Suddenly he heard the cry of a belated newsvendor, howling some British victory, some horrible scandal in Paris.  Scandal, exposure, publicity—­there was the horror.  He could almost hear the journalists stropping their pens.  If his thoughts drifted towards any potential expiation demanded by officialism, he put them aside.  A social debacle was more fearful and vivid than the dock and its inevitable consequence. . . .  Presently his eyes rested again on the mummy case.  A brilliant inspiration!  Here, at all events, was a temporary hiding-place for the corpse of the blackmailer.  If it was putting new wine into old bottles, circumstances surely justified a violation of the proverb.  Till now a severe unromantic Hellenist, he held Egyptology in some contempt; and for Egypt, except in so far as it illustrated the art of Greece or remained a treasure-house for Greek manuscripts, his distaste was only surpassed by that of the Prophet Isaiah.  A bias so striking in the immortal Herodotus is hardly shared by your modern encyclopaedist.  While the science of Egyptology and its adepts command rather awe and wonder than sympathy from the uninitiated, who keep their praises for the more attractive study of Greek art.  Yet some of us still turn with relief from the serene material masterpieces of Greece, soulless in their very realism and truth of expression, to the vague and happily unexplained monsters, the rigid gods and hieratic princes, who are given new names by each succeeding generation.  A knowledge that behind painted masks and gilded, tawdry gew-gaws are the remains of a once living person gives even the mummy a human interest denied to the most exquisite handiwork of Pheidias.

Professor Lachsyrma at present felt only the impossibility of a situation that would have been difficult for many a weaker man to face.  Humiliation overwhelms the strongest.  Modern agencies for the concealment of a body having failed to suggest themselves, he must needs fall back on the despised expedient of Egypt.  Palaeography and Greek art were obviously useless in the present instance.  He understood at last why deplorable people wanted to abolish Greek from the University curriculum.