He stopped in his speech, silenced by a shock of something like shame. He was prevaricating. He knew perfectly well that "it" was the most urgent errand a man could have, next to his duty to his country, that had brought the young sailor to his house. Twenty-four hours ago he would not have noticed such a trifle: but it was no trifle now; for to his clearer vision it was a sin, an evasion of the immutable laws of Truth, utterly unworthy of the companion of Nitocris the Queen in that other existence which he had just left.

"You have seen Niti, I suppose?" he continued, with singular directness.

"Yes," replied Merrill. "You will remember that the week was up this morning, and so I called to learn my fate, and your daughter has told me. I presume that your decision is final, and that, therefore, there is nothing more to be said on the subject."

"My decisions are usually final, Mr Merrill, because I do not arrive at them without due consideration. I am deeply grieved, as I have told you before, but my decision is a deduction from what I consider to be an unbreakable chain of argument which I need not trouble you with. Personally and socially, of course, it would be impossible for me to have the slightest objection to you. In fact, apart from your execrable fighting profession, I like you; but otherwise, as you know, I cannot help looking at you as the survival of an age of barbarism, a hark-back of humanity, for all the honour in which that trade is held by an ignorant and deluded world; and so for the last time it is my painful task to tell you that there can be no union between your blood and mine. Outside that, of course, there is no reason why we should not remain friends."

"Very well, sir," replied Merrill, "I have heard your decision, and Miss Marmion has told me she is resolved to abide by it; I should be something less than a man if I attempted to alter her resolve. We are ordered on foreign service this week, and so for the present, good-bye."

He lifted his hat, turned away and walked down the road with teeth clenched and eyes fixed straight in front of him, and a shade of grey under the tan of his skin.

The Professor looked after him for a few moments and turned in at the gate, saying:

"It's a great pity in some ways—many ways, in fact. He's a fine young fellow and a thorough gentleman, and I'm afraid they're very fond of each other, but of course to let Niti marry him would be the negation of the belief and teaching of more than half a lifetime. I hope the poor girl won't take it too keenly to heart. I'm afraid he seems rather hard hit, poor chap, but of course there's no help for it. Just fancy me the father-in-law of a fighting man, and the grandfather of what might be a brood of fighters! No, no; that is quite out of the question."



CHAPTER VII

MOSTLY POSSIBILITIES

The Professor went into the garden feeling just a trifle uncomfortable. He not only loved his daughter dearly, but he also had a very deep and well-justified respect for her intellect and scholarly attainments. Her unfortunate love for a man whom he honestly believed to be a totally unfit mate for her was the only shadow that had ever drifted between them since she had become, not only his daughter, but his friend and companion, and the enthusiastic sharer of his intellectual pursuits. Of course, anything like a scene was utterly out of the question; but there is a silence more eloquent than words, and it was that that he was mostly afraid of.

He found her walking up and down the lawn with her hands behind her back. She was a little paler than usual, and there was a shadow in her eyes. She came towards him, and said quite quietly:

"Mr Merrill has been here, Dad, to say good-bye. I told him, and so we have said it."

The simple words were spoken with a quiet and yet tender dignity which made him feel prouder than ever of his daughter and all the more sorry for her.

"I met him just outside the gate, Niti," he replied, looking at her through a little mist in his eyes, "He spoke most honourably, and like the gentleman that he is. I hope you will believe me——"

"I believe you in everything, Dad," she said quickly; "and since the matter is ended, it will only hurt us both to say any more about it. Now, I have some news," she continued, in a tone whose alteration was well assumed.

"Ah! and what is that, Niti?" he asked, looking up at her with a smile of relief.

"It's something that I hope you will be able to get some of your solemn fun out of. One of the items in the 'Social Intelligence' to-day states that your old friend, Professor Hoskins van Huysman, and his wife and daughter have come to London, and will stay ten days before 'proceeding' to Paris and the South of France, and so, of course, they will be here for your lecture, and naturally he will not resist the temptation of making one of your audience."

"Van Huysman!" exclaimed the Professor. "That Yankee charlatan, confound him! I shouldn't wonder if he had the impudence to take part in the discussion afterwards."

"Then," laughed Nitocris, "you must take care to have all your heavy guns ready for action. But, of course, Dad, you won't let your—well, your scientific feelings get mixed up with social matters, will you? Because, you know, I like Brenda very much; she's the prettiest and brightest girl I know. You know, she can do almost anything, and yet she's as unaffected——"

"As some one else we know," interrupted the Professor with another smile.

"And then, you know, Mrs van Huysman," continued Nitocris with a little flush, "is such a dear, innocent, good-natured thing, so good-hearted and so deliciously American. Of course, you can fight with the Professor as much as you like in print, and in lecture halls—I know you both love it—but you'll still be friends socially, won't you?"

"Which, of course, means garden-parties and river trips, and similar frivolities that learned young ladies love so much. You needn't trouble about that, Niti. I shall not allow my zeal for scientific truth to interfere with your social pleasures, you may be quite sure. Science, as you know, has nothing to do with what we call Society, except as one of the most curious phenomena of Sociology. Drive into town whenever you like and see them. Present my respectful compliments, and ask them to dinner, or whatever you like. And now I must get to my work—I've only three more days, and my notes are not anything like complete."

"Very well, Dad; I think I'll telephone them—they're stopping at the Savoy—extravagant people!—to say that I'll run in this afternoon and have tea. Oh! and, by the way," she added, as he turned towards the house, "there's another item. Lord Leighton has been called home suddenly on some business, and will be here the day after to-morrow."

"Oh! indeed," said the Professor, pausing. "Well, I shall be delighted to see him—but I don't know what I shall have to say to him about that Mummy."

Nitocris turned away towards her chair with a faint smile on her lips. With a woman's rapid intuition, she had seen a glimmer of hope in the conjunction of these two announcements. Although Professor van Huysman's personal fortune was not as great as his attainments or his fame, Brenda would be very rich, for her mother was the only sister of a widower whose sole interest and occupation in life was piling up dollars. He had dollars in everything, from pork and lumber to canned goods, and her own father's scientific inventions, and Brenda was the bright particular star of his affections.

On the other hand, Lord Leighton, son and heir of the invalid Earl of Kyneston, was a fairly well-to-do young nobleman, good-looking, a scholar, and a good sportsman, who had done brilliantly at Cambridge, and then devoted himself to Egyptian exploration with a whole-souled ardour which had quickly won Professor Marmion's heart, and a ready consent to his "trying his luck" with his daughter to boot. This had not a little to do with the present unfortunate condition of her own love affairs.

She had already refused Lord Leighton, letting him down, of course, as gently as possible, but withal firmly and uncompromisingly. Who could better console him than this beautiful and brilliant American girl, and what would better suit that lovely head of hers than an English coronet which was bright with the untarnished traditions of five hundred years?

Wherefore, then and there, Miss Nitocris Marmion, Bachelor of Science, Licentiate of Literature and Art, and Gold-Medallist in Higher Mathematics at the University of London, decided upon her first experiment in match-making.

When the Professor got into his study and shut the door, there was a curious smiling expression upon his refined, intellectual features. Instead of sitting down to his desk, he lit a pipe and began walking up and down the room, communing with his own soul in isolated sentences, as was his wont when he was trying to arrive at any difficult decision.

In order to appreciate his deliberations and their result, it will be necessary to say that Professor Hoskins van Huysman was one of the most distinguished physicists in America, and he had also gained distinction in applied mathematics. In addition to this, he was the inventor of many marvellous contrivances for the demonstration and measurement of the more obscure physical forces. His official position was that of Lecturer and Demonstrator in Physical Science in Harvard University.

He and Professor Marmion had been deadly opponents in the field of controversy for years. The latter had once detected an error in a very learned monograph which he had published in the Scientific American on the "Co-Relation of the Etheric Forces in the Phenomena of Light and Heat," and of course he had never forgiven him. From that day forth a relentless duel of wits between them had continued. Every essay, monograph, or book that the one published, the other criticised with cold but ruthless severity, to the great delectation of the scientific world, if not to the clarification of its atmosphere.

Socially, they were cordial acquaintances, if not friends. What they really thought of each other was known only to themselves and to their immediate domestic circles.

Naturally Professor Marmion was well aware that his elevation to the higher plane of N4 gave him an enormous advantage over his adversary, for now he could, if he chose, smite him hip and thigh, in a strictly scientific sense, and reduce him to utter confusion and public ridicule, and the question which he had come to discuss with himself was: In how far, if at all, was he justified in so using the extra-human powers with which he had been endowed?

The moment that he began to do this he became conscious of another curious complication of his recent development. On the higher plane he had argued the matter out with no more emotion than a calculating machine would have betrayed, and he had come to a conclusion that was absolutely luminous and just: but now that he came to argue the same question on the lower plane he found that he was doing it under human limitations, and therefore with human feelings.

"No," he said in the peculiar low, musing tone which was habitual to him during these monologues, "no; after all, I do not see that there would be any harm in that. Wrong, nay, sinful it would undoubtedly be to prove to demonstration that religious, social, and physical laws, may, under certain changing circumstances, be both true and false at the same time. I am, or was—or whatever it is—perfectly right in considering that to deliberately produce such a chaos as that would do would be the most colossal crime that a man could commit against humanity, as far as this plane is concerned, but there can be no harm in making a few mathematical experiments."

He took a few more turns up and down the room, pulling slowly at his pipe, and with his mind not wholly unoccupied with speculations as to what Professor Van Huysman's feelings might be if he were watching the said experiments. Then he began again:

"At the worst I shall only be carrying certain investigations a few steps farther, and developing theories which have been seriously discussed by the hardest-headed scholars in the world. Both the Greek and the Alexandrian philosophers speculated on the possibility of a state of four dimensions; and didn't Cayley, before this very Society, deliberately say that at the present rate of progress in the Higher Mathematics, the eye of Intellect might ere long see across the border of tri-dimensional space?

"Surely I cannot do any very great harm by carrying his arguments to their logical conclusions—if I can. Of course, physical demonstrations would never do: I should frighten my brilliant and learned audience out of its seven senses; but, as for mere mathematics—well, I may make them stare, and set a good many highly-respected brains—my gifted friend Huysman's, among them—working pretty hard. Of course, he will be especially furious, but there's no harm in that either. Yes, I shall certainly do it. If he can't understand my demonstrations, that's not my concern."

He went and sat down at his desk, still smiling, and went very carefully through the notes he had already made, and then through Professor Hartley's letter, and his speculations on the Forty-Seventh Proposition. This done, he plunged into a fresh vortex of figures, and symbols, and diagrams, in which he remained for the next two hours, his mind hovering, as it were, over the borderland which at once divides and unites the higher and the lower planes. When he returned to earth, the dreamy, abstracted look faded away from his face; his eyes lit up, and the pleasant smile came back.

He opened the middle drawer in his desk, and took out the first page of the fair copy of his notes, which Nitocris had made for him—thinking the while how easy it would have been for him in the state of N4 to take it out without opening the drawer at all—and looked at it. It was headed:

"RECENT PROGRESS IN THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS."

He crossed the title out carefully, and wrote above it:

"AN EXAMINATION OF SOME SUPPOSED MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES."

"There," he murmured, as he put the sheet back; "I think that such a theme, adequately treated, will considerably astonish my learned friends in general, and my esteemed critic, Van Huysman, in particular."

From which remark it will be gathered that Franklin Marmion had certainly recrossed the dividing line between the two Planes of Existence.



CHAPTER VIII

MISS BRENDA ARRIVES, AND PHADRIG THE EGYPTIAN PROPHESIES

"Now, this is just too sweet of you, Niti, to come so soon after we got here. In five minutes more I should have written you a note, asking you and the Professor to come and take lunch with us to-morrow, and here you've anticipated me, so we have the pleasure of seeing you all the sooner."

These were the words with which Miss Brenda van Huysman greeted Nitocris as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments which formed her home for the time being in London. I say her home advisedly, because, although her father and mother also occupied it, she was virtually, if not nominally, mistress undisputed of the splendid camping-place.

She was an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies' Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her physical presence was concerned, she was just a "Gibson Girl" of the daintiest type—fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired—her hair had a darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights—exquisitely moulded features which seemed capable of every sort of expression within a few changing moments, and a poise of head and carriage of body which only perfect health and the most scientific physical training can produce. In a word, she was one of those miraculous developments of femininity which Nature seems to have made a speciality for the particular benefit of the younger branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. As for her dress—well, the shortest and best way to describe that is to say that it exactly suited her.

As she spoke, and their hands met, Mrs van Huysman got up and came towards them, saying:

"Good afternoon, Miss Marmion. We were real glad to get your 'phone, and it's good to see you again. How's the Professor? Too busy to come with you, I suppose, as usual. We see he's going to lecture before the Royal Society on the tenth, and I reckon we shall all be there to listen to him. I shouldn't wonder but there'll be trouble as usual between him and my husband. It seems a pity that two such clever men should waste so much time in scrapping over these scientific things, which don't seem to matter half a cent, anyhow."

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Nitocris, as they shook hands. "You see, Mrs van Huysman, they do think it matters a great deal, and, besides, I'm quite sure that they both enjoy it very thoroughly. It's their way of taking recreation, you see, just as a couple of pitmen will try and pound one another to pieces, just for the fun of the thing. It's only a case of intellectual fisticuffs, after all."

"Why, certainly," said Brenda, as she rang for tea; "I'm just sure that Poppa never has such a good time as when he thinks he's tearing one of Professor Marmion's theories into little pieces and dancing on them, and I shouldn't wonder if Professor Marmion didn't feel about the same."

"I dare say he does," said Nitocris, remembering what had happened in the morning; "it's only one of the thousand unexplained puzzles of human nature. As you know, my father hates fighting in the physical sense with a hatred which is almost fanatical, and yet, when it comes to a battle of wits, he's like a schoolboy in a football match."

"It's just another development of the same thing," said Brenda. "Man was born a fighting animal, and I guess he'll remain one till the end of time; and with all our progress in civilisation and science, and all that, the man who doesn't enjoy a fight of some sort isn't of very much account. Now, here's tea, which is just now a more interesting subject. Sit down, and we'll talk about vanities. I'm just perishing to see what Regent Street and Bond Street are like. I don't think I've spent ten dollars in London yet. I'm twenty-two to-morrow, Niti, and my grandfather, who is just about the best grandfather a girl ever had, cabled across to the Napier people, and they've sent round the dandiest six-cylinder, thirty-horse landaulette that you ever saw, even in Central Park, and a driver to match—only I shan't have much use for him, except to look after the automobile. I'll run you round in her after tea, and you can reintroduce me to the stores—I mean shops; I forgot we were in London."

Mrs van Huysman, as usual, took a back seat while her daughter dispensed tea, and did most of the talking. She was a lady of moderate proportions, and, unlike a good many American women, she had kept her good looks until very close on fifty. She was full of shrewd common sense, but she had been born in a different generation and in a different grade of life, and therefore her attire inclined rather to magnificence than to elegance, in spite of her daughter's restraining hand and frankly expressed counsel. She had a profound respect for her husband's attainments without in the least understanding them, and she very naturally held an unshakable belief that no quite ordinary woman, as she called herself, had ever been miraculously blessed with such a daughter as she had.

Nitocris was just beginning her second cup of tea when the door opened and her father's foeman in the arena of Science came in. He was the very antithesis of Professor Marmion; a trifle below middle height, square-shouldered and strongly built, with thick, iron-grey hair, and somewhat heavy features which would have been almost commonplace but for the broad, square forehead above them, and the brilliant steel-grey eyes which glittered restlessly under the thick brows, and also a certain sensitiveness about the nostrils and lips which seemed curiously out of keeping with the strength of the lower jaw. His whole being suggested a combination of restless energy and inflexible determination. If he had not been one of America's greatest scientists, he would probably have been one of her most ruthless and despotic Dollar Lords.

"Ah, Miss Marmion, good afternoon! Pleased to see you," he said heartily, as Nitocris got up and held out her hand. "Very kind of you to look us up so soon. How's the Professor? Well, I hope. I see he's scheduled for a lecture before the Royal Society. He's got something startling to tell us about, I hope. It's some time since we had anything of a scientific scrap between us."

"And therefore," said Nitocris, as she took his hand, "I suppose you are just dying for another one."

"Well, not quite dying," laughed the Professor. "Don't look half dead, do I? Just curious, that's all. You can't give me any idea of the subject, I suppose?"

"I could, Professor," she replied, with a malicious twinkle in her eye, because she had already had a talk with her father on the altered title of the lecture, "but if I did, you know, I should only, as we say in England, be spoiling sport. However, I don't think I shall be playing traitor if I tell you to prepare for a little surprise."

Professor van Huysman's manner changed instantly, and the warrior soul of the scientist was in arms.

"Oh yes! A surprise, eh?" he said, with something between a snort and a snarl in his voice. "Then I guess——"

"Poppa, sit down and have some tea," said his daughter, quietly but firmly.

He sat down without a word, took his cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter; listened in silence as long as he could bear the entirely feminine conversation on a subject in which he hadn't the remotest interest, and then he put his cup down with a little jerk, got up with a bigger one, and said, holding out his hand to Miss Nitocris:

"Well, Miss Marmion, I shall have to say good afternoon. You see we've only just reached this side, and I've got quite a lot of things to attend to. Bring your father along to dinner to-morrow night, if you can; I shall be glad to meet him again. You needn't be afraid: we shan't shoot."

When he had gone, Brenda rang and ordered the motor-car to be ready in half an hour. Then they finished their tea and talk, and Brenda and Nitocris went and put on their wraps—not the imitation of the mediaeval armour which is used for serious motor-driving, but just dust-cloaks and mushrooms, both of which Brenda lent to her friend. As they came back through the drawing-room, she said to her mother:

"Well, Mamma, the car's ready, I believe. Won't you join us in a little run round town?"

"When I want to take a run into the Other World in one of those infernal machines of yours, Brenda," said her mother, with a mild touch of sarcasm in her tone, "I'll ask you to let me come. This afternoon I feel just a little bit too comfortable for a journey like that."

"It's a curious thing," said Brenda, as they were going down in the lift, "Mamma's as healthy a woman as ever lived, and she's American too, and yet I believe she'd as soon get on top of a broncho as into an automobile."

The car was waiting for them in the courtyard under the glass awning. A smart-looking young chauffeur in orthodox costume touched his cap and set the engine going. The gold-laced porters handed them into the two front seats, and the chauffeur effaced himself in the tonneau. Miss Brenda put one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on the first speed lever, and the car slid away, as though it had been running on ice, towards the great arched entrance.

As they turned to the left on their way westward, a shabbily dressed man and woman stepped back from the roadway on to the pavement. For a moment they stared at the car in mute astonishment; then the man gripped the woman tightly by the arm and led her away out of the ever-passing throng, whispering to her in Coptic:

"Did'st thou see her, Neb-Anat—the Queen—the Queen in the living flesh sitting there in the self-mover, the devil-machine? To what unholy things has she come—she, the daughter of the great Rameses! But it may be that she is held in bondage under the spell of the evil powers that created these devil-chariots which pant like souls in agony and breathe with the breath of Hell. She must be rescued, Neb-Anat."

"Rescued?" echoed the woman, in a tone that was half scorn and half fear. "Is it so long ago that thou hast forgotten how we tried to rescue her mummy from the hands of these infidels? Now, behold, she is alive again, living in the midst of this vast, foul city of the infidels, clothed after the fashion of their women, and yet still beautiful and smiling. Pent-Ah, didst thou not even see her laugh as she rode past us? Alas! I tell thee that our Queen is laid under some awful spell, doubtless because she has in some way incurred the displeasure of the High Gods, and if that is so, not even the Master himself could rescue her. What, then, shall we do?"

"Thy saying is near akin to blasphemy, Neb-Anat," he murmured in reply, "and yet there may be a deep meaning in it. Nevertheless, to-night, nay, this hour, the Master must know of what we have seen."

They walked along, conversing in murmurs, as far as Waterloo Bridge, then they turned and crossed it and walked down Waterloo Road into the Borough Road, and then turned off into a narrow, grimy street which ended in a small court whose three sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. They crossed the court diagonally and entered a house in the right-hand corner. They went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. Pent-Ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice slowly. Then came the sound of the drawing of a bolt, and the door opened.

They went in with shuffling feet and crouching forms, and the woman closed the door behind her. A tall, gaunt, yellow-skinned man, his head perfectly bald and the lower part of his face covered with a heavy white beard and moustache, faced them. His clothing was half Western, half Oriental. A pair of thin, creased, grey tweed trousers met, or almost met, a pair of Turkish slippers, showing an inch of bare, lean ankle in between. His body was covered with a dirty yellow robe of fine woollen stuff, whose ragged fringe reached to his knees, and a faded red scarf was folded twice round his neck, one end hanging down his breast and the other down his back. As Pent-Ah closed the door and bolted it, he said to him in Coptic:

"So ye have returned! What news of the Queen? For without that surely ye would not have dared to come before me."

He spoke the words as a Pharaoh might have spoken them to a slave, and as though the bare, low-ceiled, shabby room, with its tawdry Oriental curtains and ornaments, had been an audience-chamber in the palace of Pepi in old Memphis, for this was he who had once been Anemen-Ha, High Priest of Ptah, in the days when Nitocris was Queen of the Two Kingdoms.

"We have seen her once more, Lord," said Pent-Ah, "scarce an hour ago, dressed after the fashion of these heathen English, and seated in a devil-chariot beside another woman, as fair almost as she. It is true, Lord, even as we said, that our Lady the Queen is in the flesh again, and yet she knows us not. It may be that the High Gods have laid some spell upon her."

"Spell or no spell, the mission which is ours is the same," was the reply. "It is plain that a miracle has been worked. The Mummy which we—I as well as you—were charged to recover and restore to its resting-place, has vanished. The Queen has returned to live yet another life in the flesh, but the command remains the same. Mummy or woman, she shall be taken back to her ancient home to await the day when the Divine Assessors shall determine the penalty of her guilt. The task will be hard, yet nothing is impossible to those who serve the High Gods faithfully. Ye have done well to bring me this news promptly. Here is money to pay for your living and your work. Watch well and closely. Know every movement that the Queen makes, and every day inform me by word or in writing of all her actions. On the fourth day from now come here an hour before midnight. Now go."

He counted out five sovereigns to Pent-Ah. Their glitter contrasted strangely with the shabby squalor of the room and the poverty of his own dress, but he gave them as though they had been coppers. Pent-Ah took them with a low obeisance, and dropped them one by one into a pocket in a canvas belt which he wore under his ragged waistcoat. Neb-Anat looked at them greedily as they disappeared.

"The Master's commands shall be obeyed, and the High Gods shall be faithfully served," said Pent-Ah, as he straightened himself up again. "From door to door the Queen shall be watched, and, if it be permitted, Neb-Anat shall become her slave, and so the watch shall be made closer. Is not that so, Neb-Anat?"

"The will of the Master is the law of his slave," she replied, sinking almost to her knees.

"It is enough," replied the Master, who was known to the few who knew him as Phadrig Amena, a Coptic dealer in ancient Egyptian relics and curios in a humble way of business. "Serve faithfully, both of you, and your reward shall not be wanting. Farewell, and the peace of the High Gods be on you."

When they had gone he sat down to the old bureau, took out a sheaf of papers, some white and new, others yellow-grey with age, and yet others which were sheets of the ancient papyrus. The writing on these was in the old Hermetic character; of the rest some were in cursive Greek and some in Coptic. A few only were in English, and about half a dozen in Russian. He read them all with equal ease, and although he knew their contents almost by heart, he pored over them for a good half-hour with scarcely so much as a movement of his lips. Then he put them away and locked the drawer with one of a small bunch of curiously shaped keys which were fastened round his waist by a chain. When he had concealed them in his girdle, he got up and began to pace the floor of the miserable room with long, stately, silent steps as though the dirty, cracked, uneven boards had been the gleaming squares of alternate black and white marble of the floor of the Sanctuary in the now ruined Temple of Ptah in old Memphis. Then, after a while, with head thrown proudly back and hands clasped behind him, he began to speak in the Ancient Tongue, as though he were addressing some invisible presence.

"Yes, truly the Powers of Evil and Darkness have conquered through many generations of men, but the days of the High Gods are unending, and the climax of Fate is not yet. Not yet, O Nitocris, is the murderous crime of thy death-bridal forgotten. The souls of those who died by thy hand in the banqueting chamber of Pepi still call for vengeance out of the glooms of Amenti. The thirst of hate and the hunger of love are still unslaked and unsatisfied. I, Phadrig, the poor trader, who was once Anemen-Ha, hate thee still, and the Russian warrior-prince, who was once Menkau-Ra, shall love thee yet again with a love as fierce as that of old, and so, if the High Gods permit, between love and hate shalt thou pass to the doom that thou hast earned."

He paused in his walk and stood staring blankly out of the grimy little window with eyes which seemed to see through and beyond the smoke-blackened walls of the wretched houses opposite, and away through the mists of Time to where a vast city of temples and palaces lay under a cloudless sky beside a mighty slow-flowing river, and his lips began to move again as those of a man speaking in a dream:

"O Memphis, gem of the Ancient Land and home of a hundred kings, how is thy grandeur humbled and thy glory departed! Thy streets and broad places which once rang with the tramp of mighty hosts and echoed with the songs of jubilant multitudes welcoming them home from victory are buried under the drifting desert sands; in the ruins of thy holy temples the statues of the gods lie prone in the dust, and the owl rears her brood on thy crumbling altars, and hoots to the moon where once rose the solemn chant of priests and the sweet hymns of the Sacred Virgins; the jackal barks where once the mightiest monarchs of earth gave judgment and received tribute; thy tombs are desecrated, and the mummies of kings and queens and holy men have been ravished from them to adorn the unconsecrated halls of the museums of ignorant infidels; the heel of the heathen oppressor has stamped the fair flower of thy beauty into the deep dust of defilement. Alas, what great evil have the sons and daughters of Khem wrought that the High Gods should have visited them with so sore a judgment! How long shall thy bright wings lie folded and idle, O Necheb, Bringer of Victory?"

A deep sigh came from his heaving breast as he turned away and began his walk again. Soon he spoke again, but now in a changed voice from which the note of exaltation had passed away:

"But it is of little use to brood over the lost glories of the past. Our concern is with that which is and that which may—nay, shall be. Who is this Franklin Marmion, this wise man of the infidels? Who is he, and who was he—since, by the changeless law of life and death, each man and woman is a deathless soul which passes into the shadows only to return re-garbed in the flesh to live and work through the interlocked cycles of Eternal Destiny? Was he—ah Gods! was he once Ma-Rimōn, whose footsteps in the days that are dead approached so nearly to the threshold of the Perfect Knowledge, while mine, doubtless for the sin of my longing for mere earthly power and greatness, were caught and held back in a web of my own weaving? And, if so, has he attained while I have lost?

"What if that strange tale which Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat told me of their visit to his house—told, as I thought, to hide their failure under a veil of lies—was true? If so, then he has passed the threshold and taken a place only a little lower than the seats of the gods, a place that I may not approach, barred by the penalty of my accursed folly and pride! Ah well, be it so or be it not, are not the fates of all men in the hands of the High Gods who see all things? We see but a little, and that little, with their help, we must do according to the faith and the hope that is in us."

At this moment there came a knock at the door. It opened at his bidding, and a dirty-faced, ragged-frocked little girl shuffled into the room holding out a letter in her hard, grimy, claw-like hand.

"'Ere's somethin' as has just come for you, Mister Phadrig. Muvver told me ter bring it up, and wot'll yer want for supper, and will yer give me the money?" she said in a piping monotone, still holding out her hand after he had taken the letter. He gave her sixpence, saying:

"Two eggs and some bread. I will make my coffee myself."

She took the coin and shuffled out quickly, for she went not a little in awe of this dark-faced foreign man from mysterious regions beyond her ken, who was doubtless a magician of some sort, and could kill her or change her into a rat by just breathing on her, if he wanted to.

Meantime Nitocris and Brenda were having what the latter called "a perfectly lovely time" in Regent Street and Bond Street and other purlieus of that London paradise which the genius of commerce has created for the delight of his richest and most lavish-handed votaries. Brenda spent her ten dollars and a few thousands more, and then, as it was getting on to dinner-time and Nitocris absolutely refused to let her father eat his meal alone, she ran her out to Wimbledon at a speed for which a mere man would have inevitably been fined, asked herself to dinner, and made herself entirely delightful to the Professor.

But in spite of all her cunning wiles and winning ways she left in absolute ignorance of the subject of the forthcoming lecture.



CHAPTER IX

"THE WILDERNESS," WIMBLEDON COMMON

The little estate on Wimbledon Common, which had been in Professor Marmion's family for three generations, was called "The Wilderness." The house was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which separated their jealously guarded domains.

Generation by generation it had grown with the wealth and importance of its owners, as befits a house that is really a home and not merely a place to live in, until it had become a quaint medley of various styles of architecture from the Elizabethan to the later Georgian. Thus it had come to possess a charm that was all its own, a charm that can never belong to a house that has only been built, and has not grown. Its interior was an embodiment in stone and oak and plaster of cosy comfort and dignified repose, and, though it contained every "modern improvement," all was in such perfect taste and harmony that even the electric light might have been installed in the days of the first James.

The Professor inhabited the northern wing, reputed to have been the original lodge in which kings and queens and great soldiers and statesmen had held revel after the chase, and tradition had endowed it with a quite authentic ghost: which was that of a fair maiden who had been decoyed thither to become the victim of royal passion, and who, strangely enough, poisoned herself in her despair, instead of getting herself made a duchess and founding the honours of a noble family on her own dishonour.

Although, as I have said, quite authentic, for the Professor had seen her so often that he had come to regard her with respectful friendship, the Lady Alicia was not quite an orthodox ghost. She did not come at midnight and wail in distressing fashion over the scene of her sad and shameful death. She seemed to come when and where she listed, whether in the glimpses of the moon or the full sunlight of mid-day. She never passed beyond the limits of the old lodge, and never broke the silence of her coming and goings. None of the present inhabitants of "The Wilderness" had seen her save the Professor, but Nitocris had often shivered with a sudden chill when she chanced to be in her invisible presence, and at such times she would often say to her father:

"There is something cold in the room, Dad. I suppose your friend the Lady Alicia is paying you a visit. I do wish she would allow me to make her acquaintance."

And to this he would sometimes reply with perfect gravity:

"Yes, she has just come in: she is standing by the window yonder." And this had happened so often that Nitocris, like her father, had come to regard the wraith, or astral body, as the Professor deemed it, of the unhappy lady almost as a member of the family. Of course, after he had passed the border into the realm of N4, Franklin Marmion speedily came to look upon her visits as the merest commonplaces.

But as the unhappy Lady Alicia will have no part to play in the action of this narrative, her little story must be accepted as a perhaps excusable digression.

There were about four acres of comfortably wooded land about the house, of which nearly an acre had formed the pleasaunce of the old lodge. This was now a beautifully-kept modern garden, with a broad, gently-sloping lawn, whose turf had been growing more and more velvety year by year for over three centuries, and divided from it by a low box-hedge was another, levelled up and devoted to tennis and new-style croquet. The Old Lawn, as it was called, sloped away from a broad verandah which ran the whole length of the central wing and formed the approach to the big drawing-room and dining-room, and a cosy breakfast-room of early Georgian style, and these, with her study and "snuggery" and bedroom on the next floor, formed the peculiar domain of Miss Nitocris.

She and the Professor were just sitting down to an early breakfast on the morning of the garden-party, which had been arranged for the day but one after the arrival of the Huysmans, when the post came in. There were a good many letters for both, for each had many interests in life. The Professor only ran his eye over the envelopes and then put the bundle aside for consideration in the solitude of his own den. Nitocris did the same, picked one out and left the others for similar treatment after she had interviewed the cook about lunch and refreshments for the afternoon, and the butler on the subject of cooling drinks, for it promised to be a perfect English day in June—which is, of course, the most delicious day that you may find under any skies between the Poles.

She opened the one she had selected and skimmed its contents. Then her eyelids lifted, and she said:

"Oh!"

"What is the matter, Niti?" asked her father, looking up from his cutlet. "Nothing gone wrong with your arrangements, I hope."

"Oh dear, no," she replied, with something like exultation in her voice, "quite the reverse, Dad. This is from Brenda, and Brenda is an angel disguised in petticoats and picture hats. Listen."

Then she began to read:

"MY DEAREST NITI,—I am going to take what I'm afraid English people would think a great liberty. The trouble is this: When the Professor (mine, I mean) was making his tour of the Russian Universities two years ago, he received a great deal of courtesy and help from no less a person than the celebrated Prince Oscar Oscarovitch—the modern Skobeleff, you know—who was very interested in Poppa's work, and took a lot of trouble to smooth things out for him. Well, the Prince, as of course you know, is in London now. He called yesterday, and when I mentioned your party, he said he was very sorry he had not the honour of your father's acquaintance as well as mine. The grammar's a bit wrong there, but you know what I mean. That, of course, meant that he wants to come; and, to be candid, I should like to bring him, for even an American girl here doesn't always get a Prince, and a famous man as well, to take around, so, as the time is so short, may we include him in our party? If you have forgiven me and are going to say 'yes,' I must tell you that the Prince would like to compensate for his intrusion—that's the way he puts it—by helping entertain your guests. It seems that he has met with a man who can work miracles, an Egyptian——"

At this point Professor Marmion looked up again suddenly with an almost imperceptible start, and, for the first time, took an interest in Miss Huysman's letter.

"——named Phadrig. The Prince assures me that he is not a conjurer in the professional sense, and would be deeply insulted to be called one; also that no amount of money would induce him to give a display of his powers just for money. He will come to-day, if you like, and do wonderful things, which, from what the Prince says, will astonish and perhaps frighten us a bit, but only because the Prince once saved his life and got him out of a very bad place he had got into with a Turkish Pascha. Now, that is my little story. Please 'phone me as soon as you can so that I can let the Prince know. It will be just too sweet of you and the Professor to say 'yes.'

—Your devoted chum, BRENDA."

"Well, Dad," she asked, as she put the letter down, "what do you say?"

"Just what you want to say, my dear Niti," he replied, carefully spreading some marmalade on a triangle of toast "Personally, I must confess that I should rather like to see some of this so-called magician's alleged magic. I know that some of these fellows are extraordinarily clever, and I have no doubt that he will show us something interesting, if you care to see it."

"Then that settles it," said Nitocris, rising; "I will go and ring up the Savoy at once. Perhaps the Egyptian gentleman might be able to help you with that Forty-Seventh Proposition problem of Professor Hartley's."

"Perhaps," answered Franklin Marmion drily, and went on with his breakfast.



CHAPTER X

THE STAGE FILLS

The party which gradually assembled on the lawn about four was somewhat small, but very select. Nitocris had too much common sense and too much real consideration for her friends and acquaintances to get together a mere mob of well-dressed people of probably incompatible tastes and temperament, and call it a party. She disliked an elbowing crowd and a clatter of fashionably shrill tongues with all the aversion of a delicately developed sensibility. No consideration of rank or social power or wealth had the slightest weight with her when she was distributing cards of invitation, wherefore the said cards were all the more eagerly awaited by those who did, and did not, get them. The result of this in the present case was that, although every one accepted and came, rather less than fifty people had the run of the broad lawns and the leafy wilderness about them on that momentous afternoon.

The first of the arrivals was Professor Hartley, reputed to be the greatest mathematician in England. He was a large man with rather heavy features, lit up by alert grey eyes, a big, dome-like cranium, and a manner that was modest almost to diffidence. He brought his wife, a slim and somewhat stern-featured lady, who, in the domestic sense, kept him in his place with inflexible decision, and worshipped him in his professional capacity, and two pretty, well-dressed, and obviously well-bred daughters. Their carriage drew up, turned into the drive precisely at four. Punctuality was the Professor's one and only social vice.

Next came Commander Merrill in a hansom. This would be one of the very few meetings that he could hope for with his lost beloved—as he now sadly thought of her—before he put H.M.S. Blazer into commission, and so punctuality on his part was both natural and excusable. Then came a few more carriages containing very nice people with whom we have here but little concern; and then Miss Brenda, deeply regretting her beautiful Napier, with her father and mother in a very smart Savoy turn-out followed by a coronetted brougham drawn by a splendid pair of black Orloffs. This was followed by an equally smart dog-cart driven by a rather slightly-built but well set-up young man with a light moustache, bronzed skin, and brilliant blue eyes. He was good-looking, but if his features had been absolutely plain he could never have looked commonplace, for this was Lord Lester Leighton, son of the Earl of Kyneston, and twenty generations of unblemished descent had made him the aristocrat that he was.

Nitocris did not like pompous announcements by servants, and so she received her guests, who were all acquaintances or friends, in the great porch through which many a brilliant presence had passed, and had two maids waiting inside to see to the wants of the ladies, and their own coachman and a couple of grooms to attend to matters outside.

Merrill was made as happy as possible by a bright smile, a real hand-clasp instead of the usual Society paw-waggle, and instructions to go and make himself agreeable and useful. Brenda also received a hearty "shake"—Nitocris did not believe in kissing in public—and when the Professor and Mrs Huysman had gone in, she whispered:

"I suppose that's the Prince's brougham. You must wait here, dear, and do the introductions. You're responsible, you know."

Brenda assented with a nod and a smile, as the brougham drew up and the smart tiger jumped down and opened the door. The Prince got out, and was followed by Phadrig the Adept. As she looked at the two men, Nitocris felt as though a wave of cold air had suddenly enveloped her whole being—body and soul.

"Niti, this is our friend, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, whom you have been kind enough to let me invite by proxy. Prince, this is Miss Nitocris Marmion."

Of course all the world knew of Oscar Oscarovitch, the modern Skobeleff, the lineal descendant of Ivan the Terrible, the crystal-brained, steel-willed man who was to be the saviour and regenerator of half-ruined, revolution-rent Russia, but this was the first time that Nitocris had met him in her present life. When she had returned his stately bow, she looked up and saw with a strange intuition, which somehow seemed half-reminiscent an almost perfect type of the primitive warrior through the disguise of his faultless twentieth-century attire. He was nearly two inches over six feet, but he was so exquisitely proportioned that he looked less than his height. His skin was fair and smooth, but tanned to an olive-brown. His forehead was of medium height, straight and square, with jet-black brows drawn almost straight across it above a pair of rather soft, dreamy eyes that were blue or black according to the mood of their possessor. His nose was strong and slightly curved, with delicately sensitive nostrils. A dark glossy moustache and beard trimmed a la Tsar, partly hid full, almost sensual lips and a powerful somewhat projecting chin.

As their eyes met the shiver of revulsion passed through her again. She hardly heard his murmured compliments, but her attention awoke when he turned to the man who was standing behind him, and said with a very graceful gesture of his left hand:

"Miss Marmion, this is the gentleman whom you have so graciously permitted me to bring to your house. This is Phadrig the Adept, as he is known in his own ancient land of Egypt, a worker of wonders which really are wonders, and not mere sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks. He has been good enough to accompany me in order to convince the learned of the West that the Immemorial East could still teach it something if it chose."

Nitocris bowed, and as she looked at the figure which now stood beside the Prince, she shivered again. She had a swift sense of standing in the presence of implacable enemies, and yet she had never seen these men before, and, for all she knew, she had not an enemy in the world. She was intensely relieved when Lord Lester Leighton came up and held out his hand, and she was able to ask the Prince and his companion to go through to the lawn.

No one would have recognised the shabby denizen of the grimy room in Candler's Court, Borough High Street, in the tall, dignified Eastern gentleman who walked with slow and stately step through the spacious old hall of "The Wilderness." He was clad in a light frock-coat suit of irreproachable cut and fit. The correctly-creased trousers met brightly-burnished, narrow-toed tan boots; a black-tasselled scarlet tarbush was set square on his high forehead, and the dark red tie under his two-ply collar just added the necessary touch of Oriental colour to his costume, and went excellently with the lighter red of the tarbush. It is hardly necessary to say that when he and the Prince went out on to the lawn, they were, as a Society paper report of the function would have put it, "the observed of all observers."

"I'm so glad you were able to be here in time for my little party, Lord Leighton," said Nitocris, when she had ended the welcoming of the other guests. "Dad will be delighted, too——"

She stopped rather suddenly, remembering that Dad would have to tell his young friend the sad story of the mysterious loss of the Mummy; but another subject was uppermost in her mind just then, and, taking refuge in it, she went on quickly:

"Come along to the lawn. I want to introduce you to a very distinguished gentleman—and his wife and daughter. No less a person, my lord, than the great Professor Hoskins van Huysman!"

"What!" exclaimed Leighton, with a laugh that was almost boyish for such a serious and learned young man. "The Huysman: the Professor's most doughty antagonist in the arena of symbols and theorems? Oh, now that is good!"

"Yes; I think you will find him very interesting," replied Nitocris, hoping in her soul that he would find Brenda a great deal more interesting. "Come along, or Dad will be beginning to think that I am neglecting my duties, and I must be on quite my best behaviour to-day. We are favoured by the presence of another very celebrated celebrity to-day. That tall man who came in just before you was Prince Oscar Oscarovitch."

"Oh yes," he said lightly; "I recognised the brute."

"The brute? Dear me, that is rather severe. Then you know His Highness?" she asked in a low, almost eager, voice.

"There are not many men in the Near or Far East who have not some cause to know His Highness," he replied in a serious tone, tinged by the suspicion of a sneer. "He is about the finest specimen of the well-veneered savage that even Russia has produced for the last century. He is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful among his equals—or those he chooses to consider so—charming to men, and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour. A curious mixture: but that's the man."

"How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a position!"

But, although she did not understand why, she had heard his harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. They exactly translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate aversion—almost of terror.

She led Leighton to a little group on the left side of the lawn, composed of the three Professors and the wives and daughters of two of them. As they approached them, Nitocris became sensible of a curious kind of nervousness. She did not know that by this commonplace action she was reuniting two links in a long-severed chain of destiny, but she had a dim consciousness that she was going to do something much more important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. She looked quite anxiously at Brenda, who had turned towards them as they came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her cheeks. It was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only heard his name two or three times, and certainly had never seen him before. Then she looked swiftly at Leighton. Yes, there was a flush under his tan and a new light in his eyes. When she had completed the introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul:

"Thank goodness! If that is not a case of love at first sight, I shan't believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers may say."

Yes, her womanly intuition was right as far as it reached; but she could not yet grasp the full meaning of the marvel which she had helped to bring about. With her father, she believed in the Doctrine of Re-Incarnation as the only one which affords a logical and entirely just solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning the truth—that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness (not, of course, in the narrow theological sense of the term) began again in righteousness, and in evil meant inexorably a re-beginning in evil. That was Fate, because it was also immutable Justice. Man possessed the Divine gift of free will to use or abuse as he would, so far as his own life-conduct was concerned; but there was no evasion of the adamantine law of the survival and progress of the fittest, which, in the course of ages, infallibly proved to be the best. This, in a word, was why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour."

Yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the mystery of sexual love. Why should one man and one woman, out of all the teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by a force which none can analyse or define? Why should a woman, confronted with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and home, and all else that has been dear to her? Why in the soul of every true man and woman is Love, when it comes, made Lord of all, and all in all? It is because Love is co-eternal with Life, and these two have loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and inevitable for that.[1]

Is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law, that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? Again the woman has the choice. She obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or the stress of poverty, and crushes—or thinks she does—the ages-old love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has loved, and never can. She has defied the eternal Law of Selection. She has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the temple of her body. She has sold herself for a price in the market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of unsated heart-hunger. Instead of the fruits of Eden distilling their sweet juices into her blood, the apples of Gomorrah turn perpetually to ashes in her mouth. Often weariness and despair drive her to the brief intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only the natural consequence of the first.

But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals. There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also pays the penalty. The collective crime brings the collective curse, for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.

Nitocris had not learned this yet. It was not within the plan of Eternal Justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many lives towards the Light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such grim knowledge as this. It was enough for her now that she should be the ministering angel of Love and Light.

But at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were also two incarnations of the destroying angels of Hate and Darkness, for even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and laughter, the Eternal Conflict was being continued, as it is and must be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind.

Soon after Nitocris and Brenda had joined the group, Phadrig approached the Prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the bottom of the lawn, and said softly in Russian:

"Highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true. That is the Queen—she who was once the daughter of the great Rameses, Lady of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms."

"What?" laughed the Prince. "Miss Marmion, that lovely English girl, your old Egyptian Mummy re-vivified! Well, have it as you like. You are welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay hands on the beautiful reality. I have seen many a fair woman, and thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of Ivan, I have never seen one like this. I tell you, Phadrig, that the moment my eyes looked for the first time into hers, only a few minutes ago, I knew that I had found my fate, and, having found it, I shall take very good care that I don't lose it. And you shall help me to keep it; I shall try every fair means first to make her my princess, for, whether she was once Queen of Egypt or not, she is worthy now to sit beside a sovereign on his throne—and it might be that I could some day give her such a place—but have her I will, if not as fairly-won wife and consort, then as stolen slave and plaything, to keep as long as my fancy lasts. And listen, Phadrig," he went on in a low tone, but with savage intensity. "Your life is mine, for I gave it back to you when the lifting of a finger would have sent you into what you would call another incarnation; and from this day forth you must devote it to this end until it is attained, one way or the other. I know you don't care for money as wealth, but in this world it is the right hand of power, and that you love. All that you need shall be yours for the asking in exchange for your faithful service. Are you content with the bargain?"

"No, Highness, that will not content me," replied Phadrig, in a voice that had no expression save unalterable resolve.

"What! Is not that enough for you, a penniless seller of curios?" said the Prince, with a sneer in his tone. "Then I will add to it the ready aid and unquestioning obedience of our secret police, here and in Europe. Will that satisfy you?"

"I do not need the help of your police, Highness," answered the Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave, but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They would be less than useless to me."

"Then what will satisfy you?" asked the Prince impatiently, but with no show of anger, for he knew the strange power of the man whose help he needed.

"I do not ask you to believe in the reality of what you call my dreams, Highness," replied Phadrig slowly, "but I do ask—nay, I require, as the price of my faithful service, your solemn promise in writing, signed and attested, that, if and when my dreams become realities, and your own hopes are fulfilled, the independence and sovereignty of the Ancient Land shall be restored; her temples and tombs and palaces shall be rebuilt; her ancient worship revived in my person, and the sceptre of Rameses replaced in the hand of Nitocris the Queen."

The Prince was silent for a few moments. To grant the seemingly extravagant demand meant to reduce the splendid dream and scheme of his life to cold, tangible writing, and to put into this man's hand the power to betray him. On the other hand, their aims were one, and only through him could Phadrig hope to realise his dreams. Of course they were only dreams; but he was faithful to them, and so he would be faithful to him. At the worst it would be easy to arrange a burglary, or, for the matter of that, a murder in Candler's Court, and that would make an end of the matter.

"Very well, Phadrig," he said at length. "It is settled. I will trust you, for it is necessary that we should trust each other. You shall have what you ask for within a week. Now I must go. I shall tell them that I have been arranging the exhibition of your powers which you are going to give them. It will be well to startle them sufficiently to shake their British beef-sense up into something like fear. Make them wonder, but, for the sake of our hostess, don't frighten them too much."

Phadrig only acknowledged his promise with a bow, and he turned away and joined the growing group in which Nitocris and Brenda were still the central objects of attraction.

FOOTNOTE: [1] The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of friendships between man and man, and woman and woman.



CHAPTER XI

THE MARVELS OF PHADRIG

The time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes—in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious.

Nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that Lord Leighton and Brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. He, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, final conge from Nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.

He managed quite adroitly to separate Brenda from the circle, and to lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told her the history and traditions of "The Wilderness" not, of course, omitting the sad little tragedy of the Lady Alicia, all of which Miss Brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly derived from the story itself. She had never yet met any one who was quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat. On her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families in the State of New York and her aristocracy responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them.

It need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. She was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. But now, for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an hour. Nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between Lord Leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her disquietude was entirely unalloyed.

Her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his brother professors to take any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtle change that had come over her daughter, and she saw it with anything but displeasure. All sensible mothers of beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. She was far too wise in her generation not to have agreed with Brenda's decision in certain former cases. The idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly repugnant to her. She had married for love, and she wanted Brenda to do the same, whoever the chosen man might be, provided always that he was a man—and in this regard there could be no doubt about Lord Lester Leighton; so as they walked away she said to Nitocris with a confidence which was almost girlish:

"His Lordship is just delightful—now, isn't he, Miss Marmion? Just the sort that you seem to raise over here, and nowhere else. Tells you that you have to take him for a gentleman and nothing else in the first three words he says to you—and Brenda seems to like him. I never saw her go off with a man like that on such short notice, for Brenda's pretty proud and cold with men, for all her nice ways and high spirits."

"You would have to search a long time, Mrs van Huysman," replied Nitocris very demurely, "before you found a better type of the real English gentleman than Lord Leighton. His family is one of the oldest in the country, and, unlike too many of our noble families, the Kynestons have no bar-sinister on their escutcheon."

"I guess you're getting a little beyond me there, Miss Marmion. I don't think I ever heard of a—what is it?—a bar-sinister, before. What might it be?"

Nitocris flushed very faintly as she replied:

"I think I can explain it best, Mrs van Huysman, by saying that it means that Lord Leighton's ancestors have preserved their honour unstained through many generations. Of course, you know that some of our so-called noble families in England spring from anything but a noble origin. There are not a few English dukes and earls who would find it rather awkward to introduce their great-great-grandmothers to their present circle of friends."

"I should think they would, from what I have read of them, the shameless creatures!" said Mrs van Huysman, with a sniff of real republican virtue.

Then the Prince joined them, and the conversation was promptly switched off on to another line of interest.

Tea was served on the Old Lawn under the shade of the great cedars, which made its greatest adornment; and when everybody had had what he or she wanted, and the men had lit their cigarettes—and the Professors, by special permission, their pipes—Nitocris looked across a couple of tables at Oscarovitch, whom she had so far managed most adroitly to keep at an endurable distance, and said:

"Now, Prince, if your friend the Adept is in the mood to astonish us with his wonders, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him that we are all ready and willing to be startled—only I hope that he will be merciful to our ignorance and not frighten us too much."

"I can assure you, Miss Marmion, that my good friend from Egypt will be discretion itself," replied the Prince, with a look and a courtly gesture that inspired Commander Merrill with an almost passionate longing to take him down one of the quiet paths under the beeches for a ten minutes' interlude. "I can promise that he will show you some marvels which even your learned and distinguished father and his confreres may find difficult of explanation: but it shall all be white magic. I understand that your real adept considers the black variety as what you call bad form."

As the company rose and went in little groups towards the tennis-lawn, where Phadrig had elected to display his powers, the three Professors instinctively joined each other in a small phalanx of scepticism. If there was any trick or deception to be discovered all looked to them to do it, and they were almost gleefully aware of their responsibility. Figuratively speaking, they each wore the scalps of many spiritualistic mediums, and both Professor van Huysman and Professor Hartley sensed a possible addition to their belts of scientific wampum which would not be the least of their trophies. It had been agreed to by Phadrig, with a quiet scorn, that they were to take any measures they liked to detect him in any practice that would convict him of being merely a conjurer; and they had accepted the permission with that whole-souled devotion to truth which excludes all idea of pity from the really scientific mind. Franklin Marmion was naturally in a very different frame of mind, although, from reasons of high policy, he assumed a similar mask of almost scornful scepticism; but for all that he was by far the most anxious man in the company.

At the request of their hostess the guests arranged themselves sitting and standing in a spacious circle on the tennis-lawn; and when this was, formed, Phadrig, whose isolation so far from the rest of the company had been satisfactorily explained by the Prince, walked slowly into the middle of it, and, after a quick, keen glance round him—a glance which rested for just a moment or so on Professor Marmion and his confreres, and then on Nitocris, who was sitting beside Brenda attended by Lord Leighton and Merrill—he said in a low but clear and far-reaching voice, and in perfect English:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have come to the house of the learned Professor Marmion at the request of my very good friend and patron, His Highness Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, to give you a little display of what I may call white magic. But before I begin I must ask you to accept my word of honour as a humble student of the mysteries of what, for want of a better word, we call Nature, that I am not in any sense a conjurer, by which I mean one who performs apparent marvels by merely deceiving your senses.

"What I am going to show you, you really will see. My marvels, if you please to think them such, will be realities, not illusions; and I shall be pleased if you will take every means to satisfy yourselves that they are so. I say this with all the more pleasure because I know that there are present three gentlemen of great eminence in the world of science, and if they are not able to detect me in anything approaching trickery, I think you will take their word for it that I am not deceiving you.

"In order that there may not be the smallest possible chance of error, I will ask Professors Marmion, Hartley, and Van Huysman to come and stand near to me, so that they may be satisfied that I make use of none of the mere conjurer's apparatus. I shall use nothing but the knowledge, and therefore the power, to which it has been my privilege to attain."

Phadrig spoke with all the calm confidence of perfect self-reliance, and therefore his words were not wanting in effect on his audience, critical and sceptical as it was.

"I reckon that's a challenge we can't very well afford to let go," said Professor van Huysman, with a keen look at his two brother scientists. "Of course he's just a trick-merchant, but they're so mighty clever nowadays, especially these fellows from the gorgeous East, that you've got to keep your eyes wide open all the time they've got the platform."

"Certainly," said Professor Hartley, as they moved out from the circle; "it must be trickery of some sort, and we shall be doing a public service by exposing it. What do you think, Marmion? I hope you won't mind the exposure taking place in your own garden and among your own guests?"

"Not a bit, my dear Hartley," replied Franklin Marmion with a smile, which was quite lost upon his absolutely materialistic friends. "We have, as Van Huysman says, received a direct challenge. We should be most unworthy servants of our great Mistress if we did not take it up. Personally, I mean to find out everything that I can."

"And, gentlemen," laughed the Prince, who had been standing with them and now moved away towards Nitocris, "I sincerely hope that what you find out will be worth the learning."

"He's a big man, that," said Professor van Huysman, when he was out of earshot, "but he's not the sort I'd have much use for. I wonder why those people who are on the war-path in his country ever let him out of it alive?"

In accordance with Phadrig's request, they made a triangle of which he was the central point. Without any formula of introduction, he said rather abruptly:

"Professor van Huysman, will you oblige me by taking a croquet ball and holding it in your hand as tightly as you can?"

Brenda ran out of the circle and gave him one. He took it and gripped it in a fist that looked made to hold things. Phadrig glanced at the ball, and said quietly:

"Follow me!"

Then he turned away, and, in spite of all the Professor's efforts to hold it, the ball somehow slipped through his fingers and fell on to the lawn. Then, to the utter amazement of every one, except Franklin Marmion, it rolled towards the Adept and followed him at a distance of about three yards as he walked round the circle of spectators. He did not even look at it. When he had made the round, he took his place in the Triangle of Science, and the ball stopped at his feet.

"It is now released, Professor," he said to Van Huysman. "You may take it away, if you wish."

There was something in the saying of the last sentence that nettled him. He had seen all, or nearly all, the physical laws, which were to him as the Credo is to a Catholic or the Profession of Faith to a Moslem, openly and shamelessly outraged, defied, and set at nought. To say he was angry would be to give a very inadequate idea of his feelings, because he, the greatest exposer of Spiritualism, Dowieism, and Christian Scientism in the United States, was not only angry, but—for the time being only, as he hoped—utterly bewildered. It was too much, as he would have put it, to take lying down, and so, greatly daring, he took a couple of strides towards Phadrig, and said with a snarl in his voice:

"I guess you mean really if you wish, Mr Miracle-Worker. It was mighty clever, however you did it, but you haven't got me to believe that physical laws are frauds yet. You want me to pick that ball up?"

"Certainly, Professor—if you can—now," replied Phadrig, with a little twitch of his lips which might have been a smile, or something else.

Hoskins van Huysman was a strong man, and he knew it. Not very many years before, he had been able to shoulder a sack of flour and take it away at a run, and now he could bend a poker across his shoulders without much trouble. He stooped down and gripped the ball, expecting, of course, to lift it quite easily. It didn't move. He put more force into his arms and tried again. For "all the move he got on it," as he said afterwards, it might have weighed a ton. It was ridiculous, but it was a fact. In spite of all his pulling and straining, the ball remained where it was as though it had been rooted in the foundations of the world. He was wise enough to know when he was beaten, so he let go, and when he pulled himself up, somewhat flushed after his exertions, he said:

"Well, Mister Phadrig, I don't know how you do it, but I've got to confess that it lets me out. I'm beaten. If you can make the law of gravitation do what you want, you're a lot bigger man in physics than I am."

He turned and went back to his place, looking, as his daughter whispered to Nitocris, "pretty well shaken up." The Prince caught Phadrig's eye for an instant, and said:

"Miss Marmion, will you confound the wisdom of the wise and bring the ball here?"

It was not the words but the challenge in them that impelled her to rise from her chair, aided by Merrill's hand, and not the one that the Prince held out, and walk across the lawn towards Phadrig. She took no notice of him. She just stooped and picked up the ball and carried it back to her chair. She tossed it down on the grass, and sat down again without a word, quaking with many inward emotions, but outwardly as calm as ever. What Professor van Huysman said to himself when he saw this will be better left to himself.

It might have been expected that the miracle, or at least the extraordinary defiance of physical law which had been accomplished by Phadrig, would have produced something like consternation among the bulk of the spectators. It did nothing of the sort. They were, perhaps, above the ordinary level of Society intellect in London; but they only saw something wonderful in what had been done. Nothing would have persuaded them that it was not the result of such skill as produced the marvels of the Egyptian Hall, simply because they were not capable of grasping its inner significance. Could they have done that, the panic which Professor Marmion was beginning to fear would probably have broken the party up in somewhat unpleasant fashion. As it was they contented themselves with saying: "How exceedingly clever!" "He must be quite a remarkable man!" "I wonder we've never heard of him before!" "He must make a great deal of money!" "I wonder if I could persuade the dear Prince—what a charming man he is!—to bring him to my next At Home day?" and so on, perfectly ignorant, as it was well they should be, that they had witnessed a real conquest of Knowledge over Force.

Phadrig, who seemed to be the least interested person on the lawn, looked about him, and said as quietly as before:

"I should be very much obliged if the best tennis player in the company will do me the honour to have a game with me."

Now, it so happened that Brenda, in addition to her other athletic honours, had recently won the Ladies' Tennis Tournament at Washington, which carried with it the Championship of the State for the year, and so this challenge appealed both to her pride in the game and her spirit of adventure. She looked round at Nitocris, and said:

"I've half a mind to try, Niti. I suppose he won't strike me with lightning or send me down through the earth if I happen to beat him. Shall I?"

"Yes, do," replied her hostess, with a suspicion of mischief in her voice; "those dear Professors of ours are puzzling so delightfully over the first miracle, or whatever it was, that I do want to see them worried a little more. It will be a wholesome chastening for the overweening pride of knowledge."

"Very well," laughed Brenda, rising and dropping a light cloak from her shoulders. "It's the first time I've had the honour of playing against a magician, mind, so you mustn't be too hard on me if I lose."

Lord Leighton fetched her racquet and one for Phadrig, and they went together towards the tennis-court in which he was standing. The three Professors left their places and stood at one end of the net, Messrs Hartley and Van Huysman indulging in audible growls of baffled scepticism, and Franklin Marmion silently observant, divided between interest and amusement. He could not help imagining what would happen if he were to stand in the middle of the circle and remove himself to the Higher Plane, and then go round shaking hands and saying, "Good afternoon."

Brenda acknowledged Phadrig's bow with a gracious nod as she took her place. Then Lord Leighton handed the other racquet to the Adept. To his astonishment he declined it with another bow, saying:

"I thank you, my lord, but I do not need it."

"What!" exclaimed the other, with a frank stare of astonishment. "Excuse me, but tennis without a racquet, you know—are you going to play with your hands?"

"To some extent, yes, my lord," replied Phadrig, as he took his place. "Will you ask Miss van Huysman if she will be kind enough to serve?"

Brenda would. Phadrig stood on the middle line between the two courts with his hands folded in front of him. She certainly felt a little nervous, but she knew her skill, and she sent a scorcher of an undercut skimming across the net. The ball stopped dead. Phadrig gave a flick with his right forefinger, and it hopped back over the net and ran swiftly along the ground to Brenda's feet. She flushed as she picked it up and changed courts. Then she raised her racquet and sent a really vicious slasher into the opposite court. Phadrig, without moving, raised his hand at the same moment. The ball, hard as it had been driven, stopped in mid-air over the net, hung there for a moment, then dropped on Brenda's side and rolled to her feet again. She picked it up, walked to the net with it in her hand, and said quite good-humouredly:

"I think you're a bit too smart for me, Mr Phadrig. I can't pretend to play against a gentleman who can suspend the law of gravitation just to win a game of tennis."

"I did not do it to win the game, Miss van Huysman," he replied with a gentle smile; "I only desired to amuse you and the other guests of Professor Marmion. Now, it may be that some excellent but ignorant people here may think that that ball is bewitched, as they would call it, so if you will give it to me, I will send it out of reach."

She handed him the ball, wondering what was going to happen next. He took it and put it on the thumb of his right hand as one does with a coin when tossing. He flicked it into the air, and, to the amazement of every one, saving always Franklin Marmion, it rose slowly up to the cloudless sky, followed by the gaze of a hundred eyes, and vanished. Then he bowed again to Brenda, and said in the most commonplace tone:

"It is out of harm's way now. Thank you once more for your condescension."

"But how did it go up like that?" asked Brenda, looking him frankly and somewhat defiantly in the eyes.

"That, Miss Huysman," he replied with perfect gravity, "was only a demonstration of what Spiritualists and Theosophists are accustomed to call levitation. It is only a matter of reversing the force of gravity."

"Is that all?" laughed Brenda, as she turned away. "You talk of it as though it were a matter of turning a paper bag inside out."

"The one is as easy as the other," he smiled. "It is only a question of knowing how to do it."

She walked back to her chair very much mystified, and, for the first time in her so far triumphal journey through the interlude between the eternities which we call life, a trifle humiliated: but that fact, of course, she kept to herself. As she dropped back in her chair, she said to Lord Leighton:

"That was pretty wonderful, wasn't it? I'm quite certain that there's no trickery about it. What he did, he really did do."

"I don't pretend to be able to explain it," he replied, "but for all that I've seen very much the same sort of thing done by the fakirs in India, and I think it's generally admitted that that is either a matter of trickery or hypnotism. They make you believe you see what you really don't see at all."

"That's about it," said Merrill, with a short laugh, "Of course no one who knows anything about the East will deny that hypnotism is a fact, although I must say that these same fakirs have tried it with me more than once and found me a quite hopeless subject."

Even as though he had heard him, Phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone:

"Commander Merrill, I am going to try one or two experiments now which I should like to have very closely watched. I know that there is no keener observer in the world than the skilled British naval officer. May I ask for your assistance?"

There was something in his tone which made it quite impossible to refuse, so he replied:

"You have shown us a good many wonders already, Mr Phadrig, and unless you've hypnotised the whole of us, I haven't a notion how you have done it; but if I can find you out I will."

"That is exactly what I wish, sir," said Phadrig, as he bowed to the ladies and went back to the centre of the circle. Merrill followed him, and, with the three Professors, formed a square about him.

Phadrig, turning slowly round so that his voice might reach all his audience, said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have all heard of or seen the strange performances of the Indian fakirs: the growing of the mango plant, the so-called basket trick, and the throwing into the air of a rope up which the performer climbs from view of the spectators. I am not going to say whether those are tricks or not. Their knowledge may be different from mine, therefore I do not question it. I only propose to show you the same kind of performance without the use of any coverings or concealment, and leave you and these four gentlemen to discover any deception on my part if you can. I will begin by giving you a new version of the mango trick, if trick it is, with variations. Professor Marmion, would you have the goodness to ask one of the young ladies to bring me one of those beautiful white roses of yours?"

Franklin Marmion was on the point of saying: "I'll bring you one myself, and see what you can do with it," but he was a sportsman in his way, and, seeing that his guests were so far not all inclined to be frightened at what they had seen, he refrained from spoiling the "entertainment," as they evidently took it to be, and so he asked his daughter to go and get one of her nicest Marechal Niels.

She rose from her chair and went to her favourite tree; Merrill followed her with a ready penknife. They came back with a fine half-blown rose on a leafy twig about nine inches long. As she held it out to Phadrig he declined it with a bow and a wave of his hand, saying:

"I thank you, Miss Marmion, but it will be better for me not to touch it. Some one might think that I had bewitched it in some way; will you be kind enough to give it to Commander Merrill and ask him to put the stem into the turf: about two inches down, please."

She handed the rose to Merrill, and as he took it their eyes met for an instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. He, with many unspoken thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and planted the rose. When he stood up again Phadrig went on in the same quiet impersonal voice:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that this rose is of a pale cream colour slightly tinted with red. It shall now grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses. It will not be necessary for me to touch it."

This somehow appealed more closely to such imagination as the majority of the spectators possessed. They had regarded the other marvels they had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses without even touching it meant something quite unbelievable—until they had seen it. Instinctively the circle narrowed, and Phadrig noting this, said:

"Pray, come as close as you like, ladies and gentlemen, as long as you do not pass my guardians, for they have undertaken that you shall not be deceived."

The result was that a smaller circle was formed round the square, at the angles of which stood Merrill and the three men of science. Phadrig stood at one side facing the east. Then he spread his hands out above the rose, and said slowly:

"Earth feeds, sun warms, and air refreshes: wherefore grow, rose, that the power of the Greater Knowledge may be manifested, and that those who believed not before may now see and believe."

He raised his hands with a spreading movement and, to the utter amazement of every one except Franklin Marmion, who now saw that this man certainly had approached to within measurable distance of the borderland which he had himself so lately crossed—wherefore in his eyes there was nothing at all marvellous in anything he had done—the leaves on the sprig grew rapidly out into branches as the main stem increased in height and thickness, red and white buds appeared under the leaves and swelled out into full blooms with a rapidity that would have been quite incredible if a hundred keen eyes had not been watching the marvel so closely; and within ten minutes a fine rose-bush, some three feet high, loaded with red and white and creamy blossoms, stood where Merrill had planted the sprig.

After the first gasps of astonishment there arose quite a chorus of requests from the younger members of Phadrig's audience for a rose to keep in memory of the marvel they had seen; but he shook his head, and said with a smile of deprecation:

"I regret that it is not possible for me to grant what you ask. For your own sakes I cannot do it. If I gave you those roses they would never fade, and it might be that those who possessed them would never die. Far be it from me to curse you with such a terrible gift as immortality on earth."

The gravely, almost sadly spoken words fell upon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. Instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled Upas. They had begun to fear now for the first time. But there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named Martin Caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, to whom the prospect of an endless life devoted to his darling science was anything but a curse. Intoxicated for the moment by what he had seen, he sprang forward, exclaiming:

"I'll risk the curse if I can have the life!"

As his hand touched one of the roses, Phadrig's darted out and caught his wrist. He was a powerful youth, but the instant Phadrig's hand gripped him he stopped, as though he had been suddenly stricken by paralysis. He turned a white, scared face with fear-dilated eyes upward, and said in a half-choked voice:

"What's the matter? If what you say's true, give me eternal life, and I'll give it to Science."

"My young friend," said Phadrig, with a slow shake of his head, "you are grievously mistaken. You have eternal life already. You may kill your body, or it may die of age or disease, but the life of your soul is not yours to take or keep. Only the High Gods can dispose of that. Who am I that I should abet you in defying their decrees? Here is my refusal of your mad request."

He plucked the rose which Caine had touched, held it to his lips and breathed on it. The next instant the withered leaves fell to the ground, and lay there dry and shrivelled. The stalk was brown and dry. As he released Caine's wrist he dropped the stalk in the middle of the bush, and said in a loud tone:

"As thou hast lived, die—as all things must which shall live again."

As quickly as the rose-bush had grown and flowered so quickly, it withered and died. In a few moments there was nothing left of it but a few dry sticks lying in a little heap of dust.

The circle suddenly widened out as the people shrank back, every face showing, not only wonder now, but actual fear; and now Franklin Marmion felt that Phadrig had been allowed to go as far as a due consideration for the sanity of his guests would permit. The other two Professors were disputing in low, anxious tones, as if even their scepticism was shaken at last: Martin Caine had drifted away through the opening press to hide his terror and chagrin. The Adept stood impassively triumphant beside the poor relics of the rose-bush, but obviously enjoying the consternation that he had produced—for now the lust of power which ever attends upon imperfect knowledge had taken hold of him, and he was devising yet another marvel for their bewilderment. But before he had arrived at his decision, something else happened which was quite outside his programme.

The Prince broke the chilly silence by saying to Nitocris in a tone loud enough for every one to hear:

"I hope, Miss Marmion, that I have justified my intrusion by the skill which my friend Phadrig has displayed for the entertainment of your guests?"

She turned and looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her. Her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her. His eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, but once well known.

"Nitocris!" he murmured in Russian. "Phadrig was right: it is the Queen!"

She swept past him—Oscar Oscarovitch, the man who aspired to the throne of the Eastern Empire of Europe—as though he had been one of his own slaves in the old days, and faced Phadrig.

"It is enough, Anemen-Ha that was. Hast thou not learned wisdom yet, after so many lives? Is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the High Gods? No more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! Go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength. The Queen commands—go!"

Only Phadrig and Franklin Marmion saw that it was not Nitocris, the daughter of the English man of science, but the daughter of the great Rameses who stood there crowned and robed as Queen of the Two Kingdoms.

Phadrig raised the palms of his hands to his forehead, bowed before her, and murmured:

"The Queen has but to speak to be obeyed! It is even as I feared. But the Prince——"

"I who was and am, know what thou wouldst say. Go, or——"

"Royal Egypt, I go! But as thou art mighty, have mercy, and make the manner of my going easy."

Nitocris turned away with a gesture of utter contempt, walked slowly towards her father, and said in English:

"Dad, I think our friend the Adept is a little tired after his wonder-working. I dare say most of us would be if we could do what he has been doing. He seems quite exhausted. I think you had better ask the Prince to let his coachman take him home."

Oscar Oscarovitch's soul was in a tumult of bewilderment, but his almost perfect training made it possible for him to say as quietly as though he had been taking leave of his hostess at a reception in London:

"Miss Marmion, we must thank you for your great consideration. As you say, our friend is undoubtedly fatigued, and, as I have an appointment at the Embassy this evening, I will ask you to allow me to take my leave as well."

With a comprehensive bow of farewell to the company, and a somewhat limp handshake with Professor Marmion and his daughter, he put his arm through that of his defeated and humiliated accomplice, and led him away through an opening which the still dazed spectators instinctively made for them.