“My dear Simon,” cried Dale, “the two things don't hang together. The Franco-Prussian War is not advertised all over France like Beecham's Pills, whereas six years ago you couldn't move two steps in London without seeing posters of Lola Brandt and her horse Sultan.”
“Ah, the horse!” said I. “That's how the wicked circus story got about.”
“It was the last act I ever did,” said Madame Brandt. “I taught Sultan—oh, he was a dear, beautiful thing—to count and add up and guess articles taken from the audience. I was at the Hippodrome. Then at the Nouveau Cirque at Paris; I was at St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin—all over Europe with Sultan.”
“And where is Sultan now?” I asked.
“He is dead. Somebody poisoned him,” she replied, looking into the fire. After a pause she continued in a low voice, singularly like the growl of a wrathful animal, “If ever I meet that man alive it will go hard with him.”
At that moment the door opened and the servant announced:
“Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos!”
Whereupon the shortest creature that ever bore so lengthy a name, a dwarf not more than four feet high, wearing a frock coat and bright yellow gloves, entered the room, and crossing it at a sort of trot fell on his knees by the side of Madame Brandt's chair.
“Ah! Carissima, je vous vois enfin, Ach liebes Herz! Que j'ai envie de pleurer!”
Madame Brandt smiled, took the creature's head between her hands and kissed his forehead. She also caressed his shoulders.