s evening, I will ask you to allow me to take my leave
as well."

With a comprehensive bow of farewell to the company, and a somewhat limp
handshake with Professor Marmion and his daughter, he put his arm
through that of his defeated and humiliated accomplice, and led him away
through an opening which the still dazed spectators instinctively made
for them.

CHAPTER XII

CONTROVERSY AND CONFIDENCES

After this incident, the guests melted away, singly and by pairs and
families, thanking Nitocris and her father with much _empressement_ for
"the delightful afternoon," and "the extraordinary entertainment which
they had so much enjoyed," and many regrets that "the poor Adept, who
really was so very clever and had mystified them all so delightfully,"
had overdone himself and got ill, and so on, and so on, through the
endless repetitions and variations usual on such occasions.

A small party, including the Hartleys, the Van Huysmans, Merrill, and
Lord Leighton, had been asked to stay to dinner, but it happened that
they had a conversazione already included in the day's programme, and so
they took their departure soon after the others, the Professor, it must
be confessed, in a somewhat morose frame of mind. Like all men of
similar mental constitution, he hated to be mystified, and now, for the
first time in his long career of investigation into apparently abstruse
phenomena, he had been absolutely stumped by this perfect-mannered,
quiet-spoken gentleman from the East who performed wonders in broad
daylight, on a plot of grass amidst a crowd of people, and did not
deign to even touch the things he worked his miracles with. If he had
only used some sort of apparatus, or condescended to some concealment,
after the manner of others of this kind, there might have been a chance
of finding a means of exposure; but the whole performance had been so
transparently open and aboveboard that Professor Marcus Hartley, D.Sc.,
M.A., F.R.S., etc., etc., felt that, as a consistent materialist, he had
not been given a fair chance. Still, he did not despair; and by the time
he got back into his own den he had resolved that when it did come, as
of course it must do sooner or later, the exposure of Phadrig the Adept
and the vindication of Natural Law should be complete and final.

A discussion of the same marvels naturally bulked largely in the
conversation during dinner at "The Wilderness." Mrs van Huysman did not
contribute much wis