my hands upon the
material almost immediately."

Accordingly Gatton set off with the detective who had brought the news
of Marie's arrest and I, turning in the opposite direction, proceeded
towards my cottage in such a state of mental tumult respecting what
the end of all this would be and what it might mean for Isobel, that I
found myself unable to think connectedly; and needless to say I failed
to conjure up by any stretch of the imagination a theory which could
cover this amazing and terrible sequence of events.

CHAPTER VII

THE CAT OF BUBASTIS

"She belongs to the innumerable family of cats which suddenly came
forth from the ruins of Tell Bastah in 1878," I wrote, Sir Gaston
Maspero's "Egyptian Art" lying before me on the table, "and were in a
few years scattered over the whole world."

"She is Bast, a goddess of good family, the worship of whom flourished
especially in the east of the delta, and she is very often drawn or
named on the monuments, although they do not tell us enough of her
myths or her origin. She was allied or related to the Sun, and was now
said to be his sister or wife, now his daughter. She sometimes filled
a gracious and beneficent role, protecting men against contagious
diseases or evil spirits, keeping them off by the music of her
sistrum: she had also her hours of treacherous perversity, during
which she played with her victim as with a mouse, before finishing him
off with a blow of her claws. She dwelt by preference in the city that
bore her name, Poubastit, the Bubastis of classical writers. Her
temple, at which Cheops and Chephren had worked while building their
pyramids, was rebuilt by the Pharaohs of the 22nd Dynasty, enlarged by
those of the 26th; when Herodotus visited it in the middle of the
fifth century B.C. he considered it one of the most remarkable he had
seen in the parts of Egypt through which he had traveled.

"The fetes of Bast attracted pilgrims from all parts of Egypt, as at
the present day those of Sidi Ahmed el-Bedawee draw people to the
modern fair of Tantah. The people of each village crowded into large
boats to get there, men and women pell-mell, with the fixed intention
of enjoying themselves on the journey, a thing they never failed to
do. They accompanied the slow progress of navigation with endless
songs, love songs rather than sacred hymns, and there were also to be
found among them flute-players and castanet-players to support or keep
time to th