s off? What a litter it is! Now he will be all right
if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at
all?"

"I don't know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well,
you know. It is very good of you to come down."

"His heart is going like a pair of castanets," said Smith, laying his
hand on the breast of the unconscious man. "He seems to me to be
frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has
got on him!"

It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline
were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of
fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a
sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time
been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and
folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown
hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears
protruding at the sides. His light grey eyes were still open, the pupils
dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed
to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen Nature's
danger signals flying so plainly upon a man's countenance, and his
thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him
an hour before.

"What the deuce can have frightened him so?" he asked.

"It's the mummy."

"The mummy? How, then?"

"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 fro