Lady Enid was being embraced by Mrs. Merillia.  The Prophet extended his hand to the astronomer, who, however, turned his back to the company and, diving one of his enormous hands into the pot-pourri jar, began to rummage violently for his vanished meal.

“What is it?” said the Prophet, who had not seen the muffin go.  “Can I help you?”

Still presenting his huge back and the purple nape of his fat neck to the assemblage, the astronomer, after trying in vain to extract the lost dainty in a legitimate manner, turned the jar upside down, and poured the rose-leaves and the muffin in a heterogeneous libation upon the Chippendale table.  After a close examination of it he turned around, holding up the food to whose buttered surface several leaves adhered in a disordered, but determined, manner.

“Only a Persian could devour this muffin now,” he said, in his rumbling, sing-song and strangely theatrical voice, which always suggested that he was about to deliver a couple of hundred or so lengths of blank verse.  “Omar beneath his tree perchance, or Gurustu who to Baghdad came with steed a-foam and eyes a-flame.  Wherefore do you trample upon hapless animals that are not dumb, young man, and cause the poor astronomer to cast his muffin upon the roses, where, mayhap, the housemaid might find it after many days?  Oh-h-h-h!”

He uttered a tremulous bass cry of mingled reproach and despair, that sounded rather like the wail of some deplorable watchman upon a city wall, shaking his enormous head at the Prophet the while, and flapping his red hands slowly in the air.

“How d’you do, Sir Tiglath?” said Lady Enid, coming up to him with light carelessness.

Sir Tiglath bowed.

“Very ill, very ill,” he rumbled, looking at her furtively with his glassy eyes.  “One has had an afternoon of tragedy, an afternoon of brawling and of disturbance, in an avenue that shall henceforth be called accursed.”

He sat down upon his armchair, with his short legs stuck straight out and resting upon his heels alone, his hands folded across his stomach, and his purple triple chin sunk in his elaborate, but very dusty, cravat.  Wagging his head to and fro, he added, with the heavy, concluding tremolo that decorated most of his vocal efforts, “Thrice accursed.  Oh-h-h-h!”

Lady Enid, who seemed to have quite recovered her self-possession, sat down by Mrs. Merillia, while the Prophet, in some confusion, offered to his grandmother the bunch of roses he had bought at Hollings’s.

“They’re a little late, grannie, I’m afraid,” he said.  “But I was unavoidably detained.”

Mrs. Merillia glanced at him sharply.

“Detained, Hennessey!  Then you found what you were seeking?”

The Prophet remembered his oath and turned scarlet.

“No, no, grannie,” he murmured hastily, and looking like a criminal.  “I met Lady Enid,” he added.

“Where did you meet the lady, young man?” said Sir Tiglath.  “Was it in the accursed avenue?”