“Can Madame be wrong?” he ejaculated at length, in a muffled voice of meditation. “Can Madame be wrong?”
The Prophet gazed at him with profound curiosity, fascinated by the circular movement of the yellow dogskin finger, and by the inward murmur—so acutely mental—that accompanied it.
“Madame?” whispered the Prophet, drawing his cane chair noiselessly forward.
“Ah!” rejoined Malkiel, gazing upon him with an eye whose pupil seemed suddenly dilated to a most preternatural size. “Can she have been wrong all these many years?”
“What—what about?” murmured the Prophet.
Malkiel the Second leaned his matted head in his hands and replied, as if to himself,—
“Can it be that a prophet should live in Berkeley Square—not Kimmins’s”—here he raised his head, and raked his companion with a glance that was almost fierce in its fervour of inquiry—“not Kimmins’s but—the Berkeley Square?”