u can so that I can let the
Prince know. It will be just too sweet of you and the Professor to
say 'yes.'

--Your devoted chum, BRENDA."

"Well, Dad," she asked, as she put the letter down, "what do you say?"

"Just what you want to say, my dear Niti," he replied, carefully
spreading some marmalade on a triangle of toast "Personally, I must
confess that I should rather like to see some of this so-called
magician's alleged magic. I know that some of these fellows are
extraordinarily clever, and I have no doubt that he will show us
something interesting, if you care to see it."

"Then that settles it," said Nitocris, rising; "I will go and ring up
the Savoy at once. Perhaps the Egyptian gentleman might be able to help
you with that Forty-Seventh Proposition problem of Professor Hartley's."

"Perhaps," answered Franklin Marmion drily, and went on with his
breakfast.

CHAPTER X

THE STAGE FILLS

The party which gradually assembled on the lawn about four was somewhat
small, but very select. Nitocris had too much common sense and too much
real consideration for her friends and acquaintances to get together a
mere mob of well-dressed people of probably incompatible tastes and
temperament, and call it a party. She disliked an elbowing crowd and a
clatter of fashionably shrill tongues with all the aversion of a
delicately developed sensibility. No consideration of rank or social
power or wealth had the slightest weight with her when she was
distributing cards of invitation, wherefore the said cards were all the
more eagerly awaited by those who did, and did not, get them. The result
of this in the present case was that, although every one accepted and
came, rather less than fifty people had the run of the broad lawns and
the leafy wilderness about them on that momentous afternoon.

The first of the arrivals was Professor Hartley, reputed to be the
greatest mathematician in England. He was a large man with rather heavy
features, lit up by alert grey eyes, a big, dome-like cranium, and a
manner that was modest almost to diffidence. He brought his wife, a
slim and somewhat stern-featured lady, who, in the domestic sense, kept
him in his place with inflexible decision, and worshipped him in his
professional capacity, and two pretty, well-dressed, and obviously
well-bred daughters. Their carriage drew up, turned into the drive
precisely at four. Punctuality was t