“Mercifully her books have comforted her.  She is resting among them now.  Madame is possessed of a magnificent library, sir, encyclopaedic in its scope and cosmopolitan in its point of view.  In it are represented every age and every race since the dawn of letters; thousands upon thousands of authors, sir, Rabelais and Dean Farrar, Lamb and the Hindoos, Mettlelink and the pith of the great philosophers such as John Oliver Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Earl Spencer; the biting sarcasm of Hiny, the pathos of Peps, the oratorical master-strokes of such men as Gladstone, Demosthenes and Keir Hardie; the romance of Kipling, sir, of Bret Harte and Danty Rossini; the poetry of Kempis a Browning and of Elizabeth Thomas Barrett—­all, all are there bound in Persian calf.  Among these she seeks for solace.  To these she flies in hours of anguish.”

“Does she indeed?” said the Prophet, feeling thoroughly overwhelmed.

“She desires me to take you to her at once, sir, there to confer and”—­he lowered his voice and trembled visibly—­“to arrange measures for the protection of my life.”

The Prophet found himself wishing that he had been less precipitate in covertly alluding to Sir Tiglath’s long desire of assault and battery, but before he had time to wish anything for more than half a minute, Mr. Sagittarius had guided him ceremoniously across the hall and was turning the handle of a door that was decorated with black and scarlet paint.

“Here, sir,” he whispered, “you will find Madame surrounded by the authors whom she loves, by their portraits, their biographies and their writings.  Here she communes with the great philosophers, sir, the poets, the historians and the humourists of the entire world, from the earliest days down to this very moment—­in Persian calf, sir.”

He gazed awfully at the Prophet, and gently opened the door of this temple of the intellect.

The Prophet expected to find himself ushered into a gigantic chamber, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves that groaned beneath their burden of the literature of genius.  Indeed he had, in fancy, beheld even the chairs and couches covered with stacks of volumes, the very floor littered with the choicest productions of the brains of the dead and living.  His surprise was, therefore, very great when, on passing through the door, he beheld Madame Sagittarius reposing at full length upon a maroon sofa in a small apartment, whose bare walls, were entirely innocent of book-shelves.  Indeed the only thing of the sort which was visible was a dwarf revolving bookcase which stood beside the sofa, and contained some twenty volumes bound, as Mr. Sagittarius had stated, in Persian calf, each of these volumes being numbered and adorned with a label on which was printed in letters of gold, “The Library of Famous Literature:  Edited by Dr. Carter.  Tasty Tit-bits from all Times.”

“Madame, sir, in her library,” whispered Mr. Sagittarius by the door.  “She is absorbed, sir, and does not notice us.”