The Prophet nodded mechanically.

“Will you kindly get them?”

The Prophet rose, walked to his writing table and felt for the implements.

“If you will sit down now I will direct you,” continued Madame, authoritatively.

The Prophet sat down at the table, holding a lead pencil upside down in one hand and an account-book wrong side up in the other.

“Let’s see—­what’s to-day?” inquired Madame, of her husband.

“The seventeenth, my dear,” replied Mr. Sagittarius, looking at his wife with almost sickly adoration.

“To be sure.  Capricornus’s day for Homer’s Idyl.  Very well, Mr. Vivian, to-day being the seventeenth, and the old lady’s birthday the twentieth, you have three days, or rather nights, of steady work before you.”

“Steady work?” murmured the Prophet.

“What should be his hours, Jupiter?” continued Madame.  “At what time of night is he to commence?  Shall I say nine?”

The Prophet remembered feebly that, during the next three nights, he had two important dinner-engagements, a party at the Russian Ambassador’s, and a reception at the Lord Chancellor’s just opposite.  However, he made no remark.  Somehow he felt that words were useless when confronted with such an iron will as that of the lady in the pelisse.

“Nine would be too early, my dear,” said Mr. Sagittarius.  “Eleven p.m. would be more to the purpose.”

“Eleven let it be then, punctually.  Will you dot down, Mr. Vivian, that you have to be at the telescope to take observations at eleven p.m. every night from now till the twentieth.”

“But I have had the telesc—­”

“Kindly dot it down.”

The Prophet dotted it down with the wrong end of the pencil on the wrong side of the account-book.

“And what are his hours to be exactly, Jupiter?” continued Madame.  “From eleven till dawn, I suppose?”

The Prophet shuddered.

“Eleven till three will be sufficient, my love.  The crab, you know, has pretty well done his London work by that time.  And the old lady will have to depend very much on the crab for these few nights.”

At this point the Prophet’s brain began to swim.  Sparks seemed to float before his eyes, and amid these sparks, nebulous and fragmentary visions appeared, visions of his beloved grandmother companioned by scorpions and serpents, in close touch with camelopards and bovine monsters, and, in the last stress of terror and dismay, left entirely dependent upon crustaceans for that help and comfort which hitherto her devoted grandson had ever been thankful to afford.

“Oh, very well,” replied Madame.  “You will be able to get to bed at three, Mr. Vivian.  Dot that down.”

“Thank you,” murmured the Prophet, making a minute pencil scratch in the midst of a bill for butcher’s meat.

“During these hours—­but you can tell him the rest, Jupiter.”