e oversight with blushing apologies, while the professor inspected the
mantel ornaments with an absent air. What was twenty dollars to a king
and a sire of kings? He bowed himself from the room.

They listened until the hall door closed.

"There's yours, Ed. You earned it all right, I'll say that. My! don't I
wish I was up on that dope."

"You were the wise lady to send for me, Lizzie. You'd have killed him
off right here. As it is, he'll come back. He's a clerk somewhere,
drawing twenty-five a week or so. He ought to give up at least five of
it every week; cigarette money, anyway. Anything loose in the house?"

"They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox. Gee! ain't he good, though!
If he only had the roll some has!"

* * * * *

In his little room far up under the hunched shoulders of the house,
Bunker Bean sat reviewing his Karmic past. Over parts of it he
shuddered. That crafty Venetian plotting to kill, trifling wickedly with
the inlaid dagger; the brutal Roman, ruling by fear, cutting off heads!
And the blind poet! He would rather be Napoleon than a blind poet, if
you came down to that. But the king, wise, humane, handsome, masterly,
with a princess of rare beauty from Mesopotamia to be the mother of his
three lovely children. That was a dazzling vision to behold, a life sane
and proper, abounding in majesty both moral and material.

He sought to live over his long and peaceful but brilliant reign. Then
he dwelt on his death and burial. They had made a mummy of him, of
course. Somewhere that very night, at that very instant, his lifeless
form reposed beneath the desert sands. Perhaps the face had changed but
little during the centuries. He, Bunker Bean, lay there in royal robes,
hands folded upon his breast, as lamenting subjects had left him.

And what did it mean to him now? He thought he saw. As King Ram-tah he
had been _too_ peaceful. For all his stern and kingly bearing might he
not have been a little timid--afraid of people now and then? And the
Karmic law had swept him on and on into lives that demanded violence,
the Roman warrior, the Venetian plotter, the Corsican usurper!

He saw that he must have completed one of those vast Karmic cycles. What
he had supposed to be timidity was a natural reaction from Napoleonic
bravado. Now he had finished the circle and was ready to become again
his kingly self, his Ram-tah self--able, reliant, fearless.

He expanded his chest,