“There is no knowing,” said Yram.  “He is the gentlest creature living till some great provocation rouses him, and I never saw him hate and despise any one as he does the Professors.  Much of what he said was merely put on, for he knew the Professors must yield.  I do not like his ever having to throw any one into that horrid place, no more does he, but the Rangership is exactly the sort of thing to suit him, and the opening was too good to lose.  I must now leave you, and get ready for the Mayor’s banquet.  We shall meet again to-morrow evening.  Try and eat what I have brought you in this basket.  I hope you will like the wine.”  She put out her hand, which my father took, and in another moment she was gone, for she saw a look in his face as though he would fain have asked her to let him once more press his lips to hers.  Had he done this, without thinking about it, it is likely enough she would not have been ill pleased.  But who can say?

For the rest of the evening my father was left very much to his own not too comfortable reflections.  He spent part of it in posting up the notes from which, as well as from his own mouth, my story is in great part taken.  The good things that Yram had left with him, and his pipe, which she had told him he might smoke quite freely, occupied another part, and by ten o’clock he went to bed.

CHAPTER XXII:  MAINLY OCCUPIED WITH A VERACIOUS EXTRACT FROM A SUNCH’STONIAN JOURNAL

While my father was thus wiling away the hours in his cell, the whole town was being illuminated in his honour, and not more than a couple of hundred yards off, at the Mayor’s banquet, he was being extolled as a superhuman being.

The banquet, which was at the town hall, was indeed a very brilliant affair, but the little space that is left me forbids my saying more than that Hanky made what was considered the speech of the evening, and betrayed no sign of ill effects from the bad quarter of an hour which he had spent so recently.  Not a trace was to be seen of any desire on his part to change his tone as regards Sunchildism—­as, for example, to minimize the importance of the relic, or to remind his hearers that though the chariot and horses had undoubtedly come down from the sky and carried away my father and mother, yet that the earlier stage of the ascent had been made in a balloon.  It almost seemed, so George told my father, as though he had resolved that he would speak lies, all lies, and nothing but lies.

Panky, who was also to have spoken, was excused by the Mayor on the ground that the great heat and the excitement of the day’s proceedings had quite robbed him of his voice.

Dr. Downie had a jumping cat before his mental vision.  He spoke quietly and sensibly, dwelling chiefly on the benefits that had already accrued to the kingdom through the abolition of the edicts against machinery, and the great developments which he foresaw as probable in the near future.  He held up the Sunchild’s example, and his ethical teaching, to the imitation and admiration of his hearers, but he said nothing about the miraculous element in my father’s career, on which he declared that his friend Professor Hanky had already so eloquently enlarged as to make further allusion to it superfluous.