‘I am of the children of Isis!’

’Is that so?—­It occurs to me that you have made a slight mistake,—­this is London, not a dog-hole in the desert.’

’Do I not know?—­what does it matter?—­you shall see!  There will come a time when you will want me,—­you will find that you cannot bear to think of him in her arms,—­her whom you love!  You will call to me, and I shall come, and of Paul Lessingham there shall be an end.’

While I was wondering whether he was really as mad as he sounded, or whether he was some impudent charlatan who had an axe of his own to grind, and thought that he had found in me a grindstone, he had vanished from the room.  I moved after him.

‘Hang it all!—­stop!’ I cried.

He must have made pretty good travelling, because, before I had a foot in the hall, I heard the front door slam, and, when I reached the street, intent on calling him back, neither to the right nor to the left was there a sign of him to be seen.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PICTURE

’I wonder what that nice-looking beggar really means, and who he happens to be?’ That was what I said to myself when I returned to the laboratory.  ’If it is true that, now and again, Providence does write a man’s character on his face, then there can’t be the slightest shred of a doubt that a curious one’s been written on his.  I wonder what his connection has been with the Apostle,—­or if it’s only part of his game of bluff.’

I strode up and down,—­for the moment my interest in the experiments I was conducting had waned.

’If it was all bluff I never saw a better piece of acting,—­and yet what sort of finger can such a precisian as St Paul have in such a pie?  The fellow seemed to squirm at the mere mention of the rising-hope-of-the-Radicals’ name.  Can the objection be political?  Let me consider,—­what has Lessingham done which could offend the religious or patriotic susceptibilities of the most fanatical of Orientals?  Politically, I can recall nothing.  Foreign affairs, as a rule, he has carefully eschewed.  If he has offended—­and if he hasn’t the seeming was uncommonly good!—­the cause will have to be sought upon some other track.  But, then, what track?’

The more I strove to puzzle it out, the greater the puzzlement grew.

’Absurd!—­The rascal has had no more connection with St Paul than St Peter.  The probability is that he’s a crackpot; and if he isn’t, he has some little game on foot—­in close association with the hunt of the oof-bird!—­which he tried to work off on me, but couldn’t.  As for—­for Marjorie—­my Marjorie!—­only she isn’t mine, confound it!—­if I had had my senses about me, I should have broken his head in several places for daring to allow her name to pass his lips,—­the unbaptised Mohammedan!—­Now to return to the chase of splendid murder!’

I snatched up my mask—­one of the most ingenious inventions, by the way, of recent years; if the armies of the future wear my mask they will defy my weapon!—­and was about to re-adjust it in its place, when someone knocked at the door.