ad been
running in his head all the evening, came back to him, and he murmured
half-unconsciously:

"'Was it hundreds of years ago, my love,
Was it thousands of miles away...?'"

"And why should it not be? Why should you, who were once Ma-Rim[=o]n,
priest of Amen-Ra, in the City of Memphis--you who almost stood upon the
threshold of the Inmost Sanctuary of Knowledge: you who, if your
footsteps had not turned aside into the way of temptation and trodden
the black path of Sin, might even now be dwelling on the Shores of
Everlasting Peace in the Land of Amenti--dost _thou_ dare to ask such a
question?"

The sudden change of the pronoun seemed to him to put the Clock of Time
back indefinitely.

He was standing by his desk still facing the Mummy just as his daughter
had left him after saying "good-night." He was not a man to be easily
astonished. Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists
in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a
Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a
recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of
whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people
outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, somehow,
no one had thought of inventing before--the standard of common-sense.

The voice, strangely like his daughter's and his dead wife's also,
appeared to come from nowhere and yet from everywhere, and it had a
faint and far-away echo in it which harmonised most marvellously with
other echoes which seemed to come up out of the depths of his own soul.

Where had he heard it before? Somewhere, certainly. There was no
possibility of mistaking tones which were so irresistibly familiar, and,
moreover, why did they bring back to him such distinct memories of
tragedies long forgotten, even by him? Why did they instantly draw
before the windows of his soul a long panorama of vast cities, splendid
palaces, sombre temples, and towering tombs, in which he saw all these
and more with an infinitely greater vividness of form and light and
colour than he had ever been able to do in his most inspired hours of
dream or study?

Had the voice really come from those long-silenced lips of the Mummy of
Nitocris, that daughter of the Pharaohs who had so terribly avenged her
outraged love, and after whom he had named the only child of his
marriage?

"It is certainly very strange," he said, goin