“My dear Professor!” I cried in dismay.

He put up a pudgy hand, and said with great dignity: 

“I cannot dine with you, Monsieur de Gex.  But I thank you from my heart for your generous kindness.  I shall never forget it to my dying day.”

“But——­”

He would listen to no protests.  “If you will do me the honour of coming at nine o’clock to the Cafe de Bordeaux, at the corner of the Place du Gouvernement, I shall be there. Auf wiedersehen, Monsieur, and a thousand thanks.  I beg you as a favour not to accompany me.  I couldn’t bear it.”

And, drawing a great white handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and disappeared like a flash through the door which I held open for him.

I went down to dinner in a chastened mood.  The little man had not shown me before the pathetic side of the freak’s life.  By asking him to dinner as if he were normal I had earned his eternal gratitude.  And yet, with a smile, which I trust the Recording Angel when he makes up my final balance-sheet of good and evil will not ascribe to an unfeeling heart, I could not help formulating the hope that his gratitude would not be shown by presents of China fowls sitting on eggs, Tyrolese chalets and bottles with ladders and little men inside them.  I did not feel within me the wide charity of Lola Brandt; and I could not repress a smile, as I ate my solitary meal, at the perils of the adventure to which I was invited.  I had no doubt that it bore the same relation to danger as Monsieur Saupiquet’s sevenpence-halfpenny bore to a serious debt.

Colonel Bunnion, a genial little red-faced man, with bulgy eyes and a moustache too big for his body, who sat, also solitary, at the next table to mine, suddenly began to utter words which I discovered were addressed to me.

“Most amazing thing happened to me as I was coming down to dinner.  Just got out of the corridor to the foot of the stairs, when down rushed something about three foot nothing in a devil of a top-hat and butted me full in the pit of the stomach, and bounded off like a football.  When I picked it up I found it was a man—­give you my word—­it was a man.  About so high.  Gave me quite a turn.”

“That,” said I, with a smile, “was my friend Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.”

“A friend of yours?”

“He had just been calling on me.”

“Then I wish you’d entreat him not to go downstairs like a six-inch shell.  I’ll have a bruise to-morrow where the crown of his hat caught me as big as a soup-plate.”

I offered the cheerily indignant warrior apologies for my friend’s parabolic method of descent, and suggested Elliman’s Embrocation.

“The most extraordinary part of it,” he interrupted, “was that when I picked him up he was weeping like anything.  What was he crying about?”

“He is a sensitive creature,” said I, “and he doesn’t come upon the pit of the stomach of a Colonel of British Cavalry every day in the week.”