"H'm! And whose did I understand you to say--I--er--did not catch her name."
His glance uplifted and scoured us sourly.
"Si-Ling-Chi. Did you think I did not know? I recognized at sight her wonderful disappearing weave." He bent again with his lens. "Marvelous, indeed, after all these years," he muttered. "So long, so long! Incredible preservation!"
Billings placed his finger against his nose, rolled his eyes upward and emitted the faintest of whistles. He caught my arm sharply.
"Say, how old are you, Dicky?" he whispered excitedly.
"I--er--twenty-seven, I think, old chap," I replied hesitatingly.
Billings noiselessly slapped his leg. His face brightened.
"Been of age six years," he calculated to himself. "By George, maybe you can prove an alibi!"
He coughed again at the absorbed figure stooping over the table.
"Ah, Professor--h'm--how long now would you say it might be since--well, she you mention--how long a time since she last saw--er--what you have there--eh?"
"How long?" repeated the professor absently. Then he moved, but his hand only, and he flipped it, don't you know, as one does to banish a fly or a dashed mosquito--that sort of thing, by Jove!
"Can't you figure it out yourself?" he questioned irritably. "You remember chronology gives Hwang-Si's reign as in the twenty-sixth century before Christ; and of course, that of Si-Ling-Chi, his empress, would be the same."
"I think I divine the astute purpose of your inquiry," said the professor, pausing to polish his glasses and favoring us with a wintry smile. "It does not deceive me. You have in mind, sir, the erroneous chronology that places Si-Ling-Chi thirteen centuries earlier. Ha! Is not my suspicion correct?"
"Regular bull's-eye!" responded Billings. "I mean," he added hastily, "what's the use of denying it?"
"Twenty-six centuries before the Christian era is the best we can give Si-Ling-Chi," said the professor, carefully affixing his glasses and falling once more upon the pajamas.
"By Jove!" I said dazedly. "Then the lady--er--I mean the party--she's rather far back--er--isn't she, don't you know?"
"Two thousand years before Confucius; twenty-four hundred and twenty-nine years before the building of the Great Wall," he murmured mechanically.