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Then he went on deck again, lit a cigar, and proceeded to congratulate himself on the great good fortune which had, from his point of view at least, so happily explained away the disappearance of Franklin Marmion. Nitocris kept her room until nearly seven the following evening. Oscarovitch made frequent enquiries of Jenny as to her condition, and always received the same reply.
He is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful among his equals or those he chooses to consider so charming to men, and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour. A curious mixture: but that's the man." "How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a position!"
Tea was served on the Old Lawn under the shade of the great cedars, which made its greatest adornment; and when everybody had had what he or she wanted, and the men had lit their cigarettes and the Professors, by special permission, their pipes Nitocris looked across a couple of tables at Oscarovitch, whom she had so far managed most adroitly to keep at an endurable distance, and said: "Now, Prince, if your friend the Adept is in the mood to astonish us with his wonders, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him that we are all ready and willing to be startled only I hope that he will be merciful to our ignorance and not frighten us too much."
Dinner had come to an end now, and so Nitocris took advantage of ending a conversation which bade fair to become somewhat awkward. She glanced round the table and rose, saying: "Don't you think we've had polemics enough for one little dinner, Dad?
Almost involuntarily his thoughts went back to the promise of Queen Nitocris, and something like a prayer that it might be kept rose to his lips. They came out, and the man flashed the thin electric ray up and down the passage. It wavered hither and thither, and at last fell directly on his face.
After all his disbelief, there was an enchantment in the Stone, for here, even she, Nitocris, had succumbed to it. He sat and waited for a few minutes longer.
Long ago, this girl had taken the fever in Egypt, and died of it; but before she died she wrote a book of poems and verses, which, though long forgotten if ever known by the multitude, is still treasured and re-read by some, and of these Miss Nitocris was one. Just now the book was open at the hundred and forty-third page, on which there is a portion of a poem entitled Natural Selection.
As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg, so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last tower in 1880.
These Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a straw about the faux pas of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of the historical men more interested in a lady when she's got a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out.
Meanwhile, Miss Nitocris had finished her digest of the morning papers, given the cook a few directions, and then gone out on the lawn at the back of the house to have a quiet read and enjoy the soft air and sunshine of that lovely May morning. She lay down in a hammock chair in the shade of a fine old cedar at the bottom of the lawn, and began to read, and soon she began to dream.
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