eighbour that he
would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment he stood in
doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of
footsteps upon the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half dressed and as
white as ashes, burst into his room.

"Come down!" he gasped. "Bellingham's ill."

Abercrombie Smith followed him closely downstairs into the sitting-room
which was beneath his own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand,
he could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the
threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before--a museum
rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a
thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures
bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the
apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed
statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange,
beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and
Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the
ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was
slung in a double noose.

In the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table,
littered with papers, bottles, and the dried leaves of some graceful,
palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in
order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the
wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of
the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a
charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its
clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up
against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in
front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head
thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the
crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every
expiration.

"My God! he's dying!" cried Monkhouse Lee distractedly.

He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a
Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of
manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercrombie Smith.

"Only a faint, I think," said the medical student. "Just give me a hand
with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those
little wooden devil