Now he paced the room in deep thought. For the first time he found himself an actor in modern life, which hitherto for him meant digging among excavations, or making romantic restoration for jaded connoisseurs, of some faultless work of art described by Pausanias and hidden for centuries beneath the rubbish of modern Greece. The entire absence of horror appalled him. Even the dignity of tragedy was not there. He was wrestling with hideous melodrama, often described to him by patrons of Thespian art at transpontine theatres. The vulgarity--the anachronism--made him shudder. Having till now ignored the issue of the present, he began to be sceptical about the virtues of antiquity. Antiquity, his only religion, his god, whose mangled incompleteness endeared it to him, was crumbling away. He wondered if there were friends with whom he might share his ugly secret. There was young Fairleigh, who was always so modern, and actually read modern books. He might have coped with the blackmailer alive, but hardly with his corpse. You cannot run round and ask neighbours for coffins, false beards, and rope in the delightful convention of the _Arabian Nights_, because you have grazed modern life at a sharp angle, without exciting suspicion or running the risk of positive refusal. There was his wife, to whom he confided everything; but she was a lady from Massachusetts, and her father was European correspondent to many American papers of the highest repute. How could their pure ears be soiled with so sordid a confidence? Poor Irene! she was to have an 'At Home' the following afternoon. It would have to be postponed. Professor Lachsyrma fell to thinking of such trivial matters, contemptible in their unimportance, as we do at the terrible moments of our lives. He wondered if they would wait dinner for him. He often remained at his club--the Serapeum--to finish a discussion with some erudite antagonist. His absence would therefore cause no alarm. He consulted the little American clock; it had stopped. How like America! The only recorded instance, he would explain to Irene, of an export from that country being required--the commodity proved inadequate. No, that would make Irene cry. . . . The folly of hopeless, futile thoughts jingled on. Suddenly he heard the cry of a belated newsvendor, howling some British victory, some horrible scandal in Paris. Scandal, exposure, publicity--_there_ was the horror. He could almost hear the journalists stropping their pens. If his thoughts drifted towards any potential expiation demanded by officialism, he put them aside. A social _debacle_ was more fearful and vivid than the dock and its inevitable consequence. . . . Presently his eyes rested again on the mummy case. A brilliant inspiration! Here, at all events, was a temporary hiding-place for the corpse of the blackmailer. If it was putting new wine into old bottles, circumstances surely justified a violation of the proverb. Till