host:

"And where is your visitor from the past?"

"Prowling among my books," answered the old gentleman.

"Are we not going to see him?"

The colonel looked a little embarrassed. "The fact is, Professor Warren,
Livius has taken rather an aversion to you."

"I'm sorry. How so?"

A twinkle of malice shone in the old scholar's eye. "He says your Latin
accent frets his nerves," he explained.

"In that case," said Warren, obeying a quick signal from his accomplice,
"I'll stroll in the garden, while you present Mr. Jones to Livius."

Colonel Graeme led the way to a lofty wing, once used as a drawing-room,
but now the repository for thousands of books, which not only filled the
shelves but were heaped up in every corner.

"I must apologize for this confusion, sir," said the host. "No one is
permitted to arrange my books but myself. And my efforts, I fear, serve
only to make confusion more confounded. There are four other rooms even
more chaotic than this."

At the sound of his voice a man who had been seated behind a tumulus
of volumes rose and stood. Average Jones looked at him keenly. He was
perhaps forty-five years of age, thin and sinewy, with a close-shaven
face, pale blue eyes, and a narrow forehead running high into a mop of
grizzled locks. Diagonally across the front part of the scalp a scar
could be dimly perceived through the hair. Average Jones glanced at
the stranger's hands, to gain, if possible, some hint of his former
employment. With his faculty of swift observation, he noticed that the
long, slender fingers were not only mottled with dust, but also scuffed,
and, in places, scarified, as if their owner had been hurriedly handling
a great number of books.

Colonel Graeme presented the new-comer in formal Latin. He bowed. The
scarred man made a curious gesture of the hand, addressing Average Jones
in an accent which, even to the young man's long-unaccustomed cars,
sounded strange and strained.

"Di illi linguam astrinxere; mutus est," said Colonel Graeme, indicating
the younger man, and added a sentence in sonorous metrical Greek.

Average Jones recalled the Aeschylean line. "Well, though 'a great ox
hath stepped on my tongue,' it hasn't trodden out my eyes, praises be!"
said he to himself as he caught the uneasy glance of the Roman.

By way of allaying suspicion, he scribbled upon a sheet of paper a few
complimentary Latin sentences, in which Warren had sedulously coached
him for the occasion,