My words cooled the other’s heated blood. Once more his eyes were cast down, his hands crossed upon his breast.
‘I crave my lord’s pardon. My wound is ever new.’
‘By the way, what was the secret history, this morning, of that little incident of the cockroach?’
He glanced up quickly.
‘Cockroach?—I know not what you say.’
‘Well,—was it beetle, then?’
‘Beetle!’
He seemed, all at once, to have lost his voice,—the word was gasped.
‘After you went we found, upon a sheet of paper, a capitally executed drawing of a beetle, which, I fancy, you must have left behind you,—Scarabaeus sacer, wasn’t it?’
‘I know not what you talk of.’