aughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.

The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.

"Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"

"I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise. "But didn't
you?"

"I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called himself de
Worms. "I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in
my boots."

"And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. "I had my hand on my revolver all the time."

"So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol evidently."

Syme struck the table with an exclamation.

"Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!"

The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.

"We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing."

"Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.

"No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three hundred
against Sunday."

And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died in
his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable
President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph,
and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites,
that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred
by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow
more actual during absence, as if a man's painted portrait should slowly
come alive.

They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme's speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.

"Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?"

The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.

"Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."

Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.

"Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne
and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down."

"How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"