, take my thoughts to bed with me, since the
morning is wiser than the evening. It is all very mysterious. I
certainly hope that Annie won't find these things here in the morning
when she comes to clear up. I wonder what the Museum would give me for
them if they were not, as I think they are, the unsubstantial fabric of
a vision?"

When he got into his room and turned the electric light on, he stood
under the cluster and held up his closed hand so that the light fell
upon a curiously engraved scarab set in a heavy gold ring which had been
given to him on his last birthday by Lord Lester Leighton, a wealthy and
accomplished young nobleman who had devoted his learned leisure to
Egyptian exploration and research. It was he who had sent the Mummy of
Queen Nitocris to the house on Wimbledon Common instead of adding it to
his own collection--not altogether unselfishly, it must be confessed,
for he was very much in love with the other Nitocris who was still in
the flesh.

"Now," he said, fingering the scarab, "if I was not dreaming, and if by
some mysterious means Her Highness's promise is to be actually
fulfilled, I ought to be able to take this ring off without opening my
hand. Certainly, any fourth dimensional being could do it."

As he spoke he pulled at the setting of the scarab--and, to his
amazement, the ring came off whole. There was no scar on his finger--no
break in the ring.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his
eyes, first at his hand, and then at the ring. "Then it _is_ true!" He
was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the
dressing-table and whispered: "What a terrible power--and what an awful
responsibility! Well, thank God, I am a fairly honest man!"

As he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence
which he had never experienced before. His brain was not only perfectly
clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts
appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. The things of his own
life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. The
facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of Egyptian
history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and
monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities. He
seemed to know, not by memory, but of immediate knowledge. It was the
difference between the reading of the story, say, of a battle, and
actually t