her:

"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!"

"Wha