. Have you a
pencil and--?"

The Prophet nodded mechanically.

"Will you kindly get them?"

The Prophet rose, walked to his writing table and felt for the
implements.

"If you will sit down now I will direct you," continued Madame,
authoritatively.

The Prophet sat down at the table, holding a lead pencil upside down in
one hand and an account-book wrong side up in the other.

"Let's see--what's to-day?" inquired Madame, of her husband.

"The seventeenth, my dear," replied Mr. Sagittarius, looking at his wife
with almost sickly adoration.

"To be sure. Capricornus's day for Homer's Idyl. Very well, Mr. Vivian,
to-day being the seventeenth, and the old lady's birthday the twentieth,
you have three days, or rather nights, of steady work before you."

"Steady work?" murmured the Prophet.

"What should be his hours, Jupiter?" continued Madame. "At what time of
night is he to commence? Shall I say nine?"

The Prophet remembered feebly that, during the next three nights, he had
two important dinner-engagements, a party at the Russian Ambassador's,
and a reception at the Lord Chancellor's just opposite. However, he made
no remark. Somehow he felt that words were useless when confronted with
such an iron will as that of the lady in the pelisse.

"Nine would be too early, my dear," said Mr. Sagittarius. "Eleven p.m.
would be more to the purpose."

"Eleven let it be then, punctually. Will you dot down, Mr. Vivian, that
you have to be at the telescope to take observations at eleven p.m.
every night from now till the twentieth."

"But I have had the telesc--"

"Kindly dot it down."

The Prophet dotted it down with the wrong end of the pencil on the wrong
side of the account-book.

"And what are his hours to be exactly, Jupiter?" continued Madame. "From
eleven till dawn, I suppose?"

The Prophet shuddered.

"Eleven till three will be sufficient, my love. The crab, you know, has
pretty well done his London work by that time. And the old lady will
have to depend very much on the crab for these few nights."

At this point the Prophet's brain began to swim. Sparks seemed to float
before his eyes, and amid these sparks, nebulous and fragmentary visions
appeared, visions of his beloved grandmother companioned by scorpions
and serpents, in close touch with camelopards and bovine monsters, and,
in the last stress of terror and dismay, left entirely dependent
upon crustaceans for that help and comfort which hithert