The American writhed, and had it not been for Brenda's gently but firmly restraining hand, he might have jumped to his feet and precipitated matters in a somewhat embarrassing fashion.

The chairman looked up at the lecturer with elevated eyelids which had a note of interrogation under each of them, and then there came that sound of shifting in seats and breathing in many low keys which denotes that an audience has been wound up to a very tense pitch of expectation.

If a smaller man had said such words to such hearers some one would have laughed, and then would have burst forth a storm of derision.

But the keenest critic had never found Franklin Marmion wrong yet, and he had far too great a reputation to permit himself to say in such a place that which he did not seriously mean.

So the hum died down as he went to the black-board, and Nitocris looked at Merrill with something like fear in her eyes.
"If he does that," whispered Phadrig to the Prince in Russian, "the story that Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat told will be true--which the High Gods forbid!" "As the trisection of the triangle is, perhaps, the simplest of the three problems," said the lecturer, with almost judicial calmness, "we will, if you please, begin with that.