"I understood you to say, sir, that if any more telegrams was to arrive, I was to burn them, sir."
"Telegrams! Good Heavens! You don't mean to say that--"
"There has been some seventeen or eighteen, sir. I have burnt them, sir, to ashes, according to your orders."
"Quite right, Mr. Ferdinand," said the Prophet, putting his hand up to his hair, to feel if it were turning grey. "Quite right. How is--how, I say, is Mrs. Merillia?"
"Well, Master Hennessey, she's not dead yet."
And Mr. Ferdinand, with a contorted countenance moved towards the servants' hall.
The Prophet stood quite still with his hat and coat on for several minutes. An amazing self-possession had come to him, the unnatural self-possession of despair. He felt quite calm, as the statue of a dead alderman feels on the embankment of its native city. Nothing seemed to matter at all. He might have been Marcus Aurelius--till a loud double knock came to the front door. Then he might have been any dangerous lunatic, ripe for a strait waistcoat. Mr. Ferdinand approached. The Prophet faced him.
"Kindly retire, Mr. Ferdinand," he said in a very quiet voice. "I will answer that knock."
Mr. Ferdinand retired rather rapidly. The knock was repeated. The Prophet opened the door. A telegraph boy, about two and a half feet high, stood outside upon the step.
"Telegram, sir," he said in a thin voice.
"Give it to me, my lad," replied the Prophet.
The small boy handed the telegram and turned to depart.
"Wait a moment, my lad," said the Prophet, very gently.
"Do you wish to be strangled, my lad?" asked the Prophet.
The small boy tried to recoil, but his terror rooted him firmly to the spot.
"Do all the other boys at the office wish to be strangled?" continued the Prophet. "Come, my lad, why don't you answer me?"
"No, sir," whispered the small boy, passing his little tongue over his pale lips.
"Very well, my lad, the next boy who brings a telegram to this house will be strangled, do you understand that?"
"Yes, sir," sighed the small boy, like a terror-stricken Zephyr.
The Prophet closed the street door very softly, and the small boy dropped fainting on the pavement and was carried to the nearest hospital on a stretcher by two dutiful policemen.