corner of the table,
occupying the same space as the enamelled flagon of wine and the
drinking goblet which the long-dead other-self of Miss Nitocris had
placed on the little silver salver.

He looked about the room anxiously, with a feeling nearer akin to
physical dread than he had ever experienced before; but his worst fears
were not fulfilled. Nitocris the Queen had vanished and the Mummy was
back in its case, blind, rigid, and silent, as it had been for fifty
centuries.

For several moments he looked at the hard, grey, fixed features of the
woman who had once been Nitocris, Queen of Middle Egypt, half expecting,
after what he had seen, or thought he had seen, that the soul would
return, that the long-closed eyes would open again, and that the
long-silent lips would speak to him. But no! For all the answer that he
got he might as well have been looking upon the granite features of the
Sphinx itself. He turned away again towards the table, and murmured:

"Ah well! I suppose it was only an hallucination, after all. One of
these strange pranks that the over-strained intellect sometimes plays
with us. Perhaps I have been thinking too much lately. And now I really
think I had better follow Niti's advice, and take my night-cap and go to
bed."

But as he put out his hand to take the whisky decanter he stopped and
pulled it back.

"What on earth is the matter with me?" he said, putting his hand to his
head. "That decanter is mine--it is the same, and yet it is standing in
just the same place as that other thing--and I remember that, too. Look
here, Franklin Marmion, my friend, if you were not a rather over-worked
man I should think you had had a good deal too much to drink. Two bodies
_cannot_ occupy the same space. It is ridiculous, impossible!"

As he said the last word, his voice rose a little, and, as it seemed, an
echo came back from one of the corners of the room:

"Impossible, impossible?"

There seemed to be a sarcastic note of interrogation after the last
word.

"Eh? What was that?" and he looked round at the mummy-case. Her
long-dead Majesty was still reclining in it, silent and impassive.

"Oh, this won't do at all! Hartley and the fourth dimension be hanged!
It strikes me that this way madness lies if you only go far enough. I'll
have that night-cap at once and go to bed."

He put out his hand, took hold of the whisky decanter, and as he drew
back his arm he saw that instead he held the enamelled f