"Are they not?" said the little man, delighted with his hospitality, and so I left them—two ladies and an Egyptologist sucking lemon-drops and talking amiably of the great stone of Iris-Iris—while I attended on more modern matters, but with regret. I returned, however, in time to escort the scientist to his bedroom, where he opened his valise and took from it a faded cotton night-gown, which with a few papers and a Testament seemed its sole contents. His books, he explained, had gone on by freight. As I turned to leave him he said, earnestly:
"Doctor, my old friend's daughter is a most remarkable woman, sir—a most remarkable woman."
"She is, indeed," I assented.
"Why," said he, "she evinced an interest in the smallest detail of my work! Nothing was too trivial, or too profound for her. I was astonished, sir."
"She is a scholar's daughter, you must remember, Mr. Percival."
"Ah!" said he. "That's it. That's it, doctor. And what an ideal companion she would make for another scholar, sir!—or any man."
Next morning I was called into the country before our guest had risen, and when I returned at noon he had gone, leaving me regretful messages. I heard then what had happened in my absence. Hiram Ptolemy—it is the name we gave to our Egyptologist—had awakened soon after my departure and was found by Dove walking meditatively in the garden. After breakfast, while my wife was busy with little Robin, Letitia listened attentively to a further discourse on the Iris-Iris, which, she was told, bore on its surface a glorious message from the ancient to the modern world.
"It will cause, dear madam," said the scientist, his eyes dilating and his voice trembling with emotion, "a revolution in our retrospective vision; it will bring us, as it were, face to face with a civilization that will shame our own!"
Letitia told Dove there was a wondrous dignity in the little man as he spoke those words. Then he paused in his eloquence.
"Miss Primrose," he said, "permit me to pay you a great compliment: I have never in my life had the privilege—of meeting a woman—of such understanding as your own. You are remarkably—remarkably like your learned and lamented father."