"I don't know. It's beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it.
It's the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter.
I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him."

"What does he want with the mummy, then?"

"Oh, he's a crank, you know. It's his hobby. He knows more about
these things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn't! Ah,
he's beginning to come to."

A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham's
ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He
clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his
teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition
around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa,
seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key,
and then staggered back on to the sofa.

"What's up?" he asked. "What do you chaps want?"

"You've been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss," said Monkhouse
Lee. "If our neighbour here from above hadn't come down, I'm sure I
don't know what I should have done with you."

"Ah, it's Abercrombie Smith," said Bellingham, glancing up at him.
"How very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what
a fool I am!"

He sunk his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of
hysterical laughter.

"Look here! Drop it!" cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder.

"Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight
games with mummies, or you'll be going off your chump. You're all on
wires now."

"I wonder," said Bellingham, "whether you would be as cool as I am if
you had seen----"

"What then?"

"Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with
a mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite
right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much
lately. But I am all right now. Please don't go, though. Just wait
for a few minutes until I am quite myself."

"The room is very close," remarked Lee, throwing open the window and
letting in the cool night air.

"It's balsamic resin," said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried
palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the
lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting
odour filled the chamber. "It's the sacred plant--the plant of the
priests," he remarked. "Do you know anything of E