s he said impulsively:

"Rejoice with me, my dear Miss Trelawny, my luggage has come and all my
things are intact!" Then his face fell as he added, "Except the lamps.
The lamps that were worth all the rest a thousand times...." He
stopped, struck by the strange pallor of her face. Then his eyes,
following her look and mine, lit on the cluster of lamps in the drawer.
He gave a sort of cry of surprise and joy as he bent over and touched
them:

"My lamps! My lamps! Then they are safe--safe--safe! ... But how, in
the name of God--of all the Gods--did they come here?"

We all stood silent. The Detective made a deep sound of in-taking
breath. I looked at him, and as he caught my glance he turned his eyes
on Miss Trelawny whose back was toward him.

There was in them the same look of suspicion which had been there when
he had spoken to me of her being the first to find her father on the
occasions of the attacks.

Chapter IX

The Need of Knowledge

Mr. Corbeck seemed to go almost off his head at the recovery of the
lamps. He took them up one by one and looked them all over tenderly,
as though they were things that he loved. In his delight and
excitement he breathed so hard that it seemed almost like a cat
purring. Sergeant Daw said quietly, his voice breaking the silence
like a discord in a melody:

"Are you quite sure those lamps are the ones you had, and that were
stolen?"

His answer was in an indignant tone: "Sure! Of course I'm sure.
There isn't another set of lamps like these in the world!"

"So far as you know!" The Detective's words were smooth enough, but
his manner was so exasperating that I was sure he had some motive in
it; so I waited in silence. He went on:

"Of course there may be some in the British Museum; or Mr. Trelawny may
have had these already. There's nothing new under the sun, you know,
Mr. Corbeck; not even in Egypt. These may be the originals, and yours
may have been the copies. Are there any points by which you can
identify these as yours?"

Mr. Corbeck was really angry by this time. He forgot his reserve; and
in his indignation poured forth a torrent of almost incoherent, but
enlightening, broken sentences:

"Identify! Copies of them! British Museum! Rot! Perhaps they keep a
set in Scotland Yard for teaching idiot policemen Egyptology! Do I
know them? When I have carried them about my body, in the desert, for
three months; and lay awake night after nig