nded rather like the wail of some deplorable watchman upon a city
wall, shaking his enormous head at the Prophet the while, and flapping
his red hands slowly in the air.

"How d'you do, Sir Tiglath?" said Lady Enid, coming up to him with light
carelessness.

Sir Tiglath bowed.

"Very ill, very ill," he rumbled, looking at her furtively with his
glassy eyes. "One has had an afternoon of tragedy, an afternoon of
brawling and of disturbance, in an avenue that shall henceforth be
called accursed."

He sat down upon his armchair, with his short legs stuck straight out
and resting upon his heels alone, his hands folded across his stomach,
and his purple triple chin sunk in his elaborate, but very dusty,
cravat. Wagging his head to and fro, he added, with the heavy,
concluding tremolo that decorated most of his vocal efforts, "Thrice
accursed. Oh-h-h-h!"

Lady Enid, who seemed to have quite recovered her self-possession, sat
down by Mrs. Merillia, while the Prophet, in some confusion, offered to
his grandmother the bunch of roses he had bought at Hollings's.

"They're a little late, grannie, I'm afraid," he said. "But I was
unavoidably detained."

Mrs. Merillia glanced at him sharply.

"Detained, Hennessey! Then you found what you were seeking?"

The Prophet remembered his oath and turned scarlet.

"No, no, grannie," he murmured hastily, and looking like a criminal. "I
met Lady Enid," he added.

"Where did you meet the lady, young man?" said Sir Tiglath. "Was it in
the accursed avenue?"

Lady Enid shot a hasty glance of warning at the Prophet. Mrs. Merillia
intercepted it, and began to form fresh ideas of that young person, whom
she had formerly called sensible, but whom she now began to think of as
crafty.

"Which avenue is that, Sir Tiglath?" asked the Prophet, with a rather
inadequate assumption of innocence.

"The Avenue in which one beholds the perfidy darting into hidden places,
young man, in which the defenders of foolish virgins are buffeted and
browbeaten by counter-jumpers with craniums as big as the great nebula
of Orion. The avenue named after a crumbled philanthropist, who could
walk, sheeted, through the atrocious night could his sacred dust awake
to the abominations that are perpetrated under the protection of his
shadow. Let dragons lay it waste like the highways of Babylon."

He gathered up a crumpet, and blinked at Lady Enid, who was airily
sipping her tea with a slightly detached air of c