now, the Valley
of Fear."

"We wondered--" It was Lady Statham's voice, and she leaned forward
eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete.
Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over
him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the
phrase--"we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But
you paint, don't you? You draw, I mean?"

The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant
something _they_ deemed significant. Was it his talent for drawing that
they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a simple
affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet
that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some
ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression
some Power--some type of life--known long ago to ancient worship, and
that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil--his
pencil.

A gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. He balanced on the
edge of knowing unutterable things. Here was a clue that might lead him
towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know. An awful hand was
beckoning. The sands were shifting. He saw the million eyes of the
Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. Speck by
speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the
countless wrappings that embalmed it.

And he was willing, yet afraid. Why in the world did he hesitate and
shrink? Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching
personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with
warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured.
It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. A
thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever
across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty,
dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was thinking venal
purposes.

In Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what
had been suggested rather than actually said. Ideas of immensity crowded
his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. They were familiar, even as
this strange woman was familiar. Once, long ago, he had known them well;
had even practised them beneath these bright Egyptian stars. Whence came
this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty
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