had his reputation to make.
His theories had caused much comment.

"I could never live in a city again," he said. "This life has made it
impossible. And the odd thing is that it has made cities seem to me
the loneliest, most desolate places in the world. I never feel in
touch with anyone. Even the other night at the ball, jolly as it was,
I never once talked to anyone about anything that really interested me.
I never felt that anyone would understand a single thing about all that
is my real life. I suppose everyone feels the same--that their real
selves are lost in crowds."

Michael and Margaret looked at each other. They had experienced the
feeling; they had lost each other. In the valley they had come back to
the things of Truth.

"You know I always abhorred town-life," Mike said, "and all its
artificiality and rottenness and needless accumulation of unnecessary
things."

"Brains congregate in cities, all the same," Freddy said, "if you can
only strike them. We'd get too one-sided here, too lost in the past.
It's never wise to let your hobbies and work exclude all other
interests."

"I begin to think there is no past," Meg said. "Time lost itself in
Egypt. Three thousand years mean nothing. The people who lived and
ruled before Moses was born are more alive and real to-day for us than
the events of yesterday's evening paper. I think I have learned just a
tiny bit of what infinity means."

"Or rather, you have learned that you haven't," Mike said. "By the
time you have discovered that three thousand years are just yesterday,
you have grasped the truth of the fact that no mortal mind can conceive
the meaning of the word infinity."

"Have you ever seen a ghost in Egypt, Freddy?" Margaret said,
irrelevantly.

"No, never," he said.

"Did the ancients believe in them?"

Freddy was locking up the hut. "We never come across any writing or
pictures to show us that they did, so I don't think it's likely. They
have told us most things about themselves and about what they saw and
feared."

"I wonder?" Margaret said meditatively. "I wonder if they did or
didn't?"

"Of course they believed," Michael said, "that the soul of a man, the
_anima_, at the death of the body, flew to the gods. It came back at
intervals to comfort the mummy."

"That's nothing to do with what we call ghosts," Freddy said, "and no
one but the mummy is supposed to have been visited by it. It took the
form of a bird with h