“In there, sir, I verily believe!” cried Mr. Sagittarius, pointing in the direction of the crowd with a hand that shook like all the leaves in Vallombrosa.

“Let me find him!” shouted the astronomer.  “Let me only discover him!  I’ll break every bone in his accursed body.”

And with this rather bald statement he rolled out of the room in one direction, while Mr. Sagittarius, without more ado, cast aside his toga virilibus and darted out of it into another, just as Madame escorted by Mrs. Bridgeman, Lady Enid, the great Towle and the whole of the company assembled at Zoological House, appeared majestically—­and proceeding as an Empress—­in the aperture of the main doorway.

CHAPTER XIX

MRS. MERILLIA HEATS THE POKER

When Mr. Sagittarius, running at his fullest speed, emerged from Zoological House, wearing the hat and coat that the saturnine little clergyman had left behind him, the night was damp and gusty.  As he hastened down the drive, and the sound of twenty guitars, playing “Oh would I were a Spaniard among you lemon groves!” died away in the lighted mansion behind him, he heard the roaring of the beasts in the gardens close by.  In the wet darkness it sounded peculiarly terrific.  He shuddered, and, holding up Mr. Ferdinand’s trousers with both hands, hurried onward through the mire, whither he knew not.  His only thought was that all was now discovered and that his life was in danger.  A woman’s vanity had wrecked his future.  He must hide somewhere for the night, and get away in the morning, perhaps on board some tramp steamer bound for Buenos Ayres, or on a junk weighing anchor for Hayti or Java, or some other distant place.  Vague memories of books he had read when a boy came back to him as he ran through the unkempt wilds of the Regent’s Park.  He saw himself a stowaway hidden in a hold, alone with rats and ships’ biscuits.  He saw himself working his way out before the mast, sent aloft in hurricanes on pitch-black nights, or turning the wheel the wrong way round and bringing the ship to wreck upon iron-bound coasts swarming with sharks and savages.  The lions roared again, and the black panthers snarled behind their prison bars.  He thought of the peaceful waters of the river Mouse, of the library of Madame, of the happy little circle of architects and their wives, of all that he must leave.

What wonder if he dropped a tear into the muddy road?  What wonder if a sob rent the bosom of Mr. Ferdinand’s now disordered shirt front?  On and on Mr. Sagittarius—­or Malkiel the Second, as he may from henceforth be called—­went blindly, on and on till the Park was left behind, till crescents gave way to squares, and squares to streets.  He passed an occasional policeman and slunk away from the penetrating bull’s-eye.  He heard now and then the far-off rattle of a cab, the shrill cry of a whistle, the howl of a butler summoning a vehicle, the coo of a cook bidding good-night to the young tradesman whom she loved before the area gate.  And all these familiar London sounds struck strangely on his ear.  When would he hear them again?  Perhaps never.  He stumbled on blinded with emotion.