Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/134

 in writing of the sigil—as I called it—I designed to employ only such general terms as romance ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote—I thought—was sheer invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I derived the idea of my so-called sigil's appearance. That bit of metal was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even to-day, as to how it came to be lying in one of my own garden-*paths."

He paused. The prelate nodded. "It is always interesting to hear whence makers of creative literature draw their material," he stated.

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir," Kennaston asked gaily, "to what wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to believe it the cream of an