"The name--er--the name is--oh, yes, I get it--the name is Ram-tah." "Can I find him in the histories?" "You cannot," answered the seer emphatically. "I am probably the only living man that can tell you very much about him." "When did he--pass on?" "At the age of eighty-two years. He was deeply mourned by all his people. He had been a king of great strength of character, stern at moments, but ever just. His remains received the treatment customary in those times, and the mummy was interred in the royal sepulchre which is now covered by the sands of the centuries. Anything else?" Bean was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes lost in that far, glorious past. "Nothing else, now, I think. If I could see you again some time, I'd like to ask--" "My mission is to serve," answered the other, caressing the moustache with a deft hand. "Anything I can do for you, any time, command me." The Countess appeared from between the curtains. "Was the conditions right?" she asked. "They have been, at least _so_ far," replied the professor crisply, with a side-glance at Bean who seemed on the point of leaving. "Say, friend, I guess you're forgetting something, ain't you?" demanded the Countess archly. And Bean perceived that he had indeed forgotten something. He rectified the oversight with blushing apologies, while the professor inspected the mantel ornaments with an absent air. What was twenty dollars to a king and a sire of kings? He bowed himself from the room. They listened until the hall door closed. "There's yours, Ed. You earned it all right, I'll say that. My! don't I wish I was up on that dope." "You were the wise lady to send for me, Lizzie. You'd have killed him off right here. As it is, he'll come back. He's a clerk somewhere, drawing twenty-five a week or so. He ought to give up at least five of it every week; cigarette money, anyway. Anything loose in the house?" "They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox. Gee! ain't he good, though! If he only had the roll some has!" * * * * * In his little room far up under the hunched shoulders of the house, Bunker Bean sat reviewing his Karmic past. Over parts of it he shuddered. That crafty Venetian plotting to kill, trifling wickedly with the inlaid dagger; the brutal Roman, ruling by fear, cutting off heads! And the blind poet! He would rather be Napoleon than a blind poet, if you came down to that. But the king, wise, humane, handsome, masterly, with a princess of rare beauty from Mesopotamia to be the mother of his three lovely children. That was a dazzling vision to behold, a life sane and proper, abounding in majesty both moral and material.