nts fallacious."

"What do you mean?" demanded Grant.

"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you could possess a
knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--"

"Oh! confound Zulu life," cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. "I
mean, have you got the post?"

"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said,
opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that. But the
real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me
since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose
a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it
is absolutely impeded by the facts."

"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely
long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may
be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with
Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal,
a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal
we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular,
seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by
his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there
had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern
carelessness in being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he
opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and
drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but
something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure
had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack
guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been
for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was
scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his
seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and
came round to me in two strides.

"What do you make of that?" he said, and flattened out the wire in front
of me.

It ran: "Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd."

"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause, irritably. "Those
women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he
was born."

"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It