id the Master to himself, as the door closed behind his visitor.
"He's in a hurry to be gone. He has fear lest I should change my mind
about that ring. Also there is the bronze. Monsieur Smith was _ruse_
there. It is worth a thousand pounds, that bronze. Yet I do not believe
he was thinking of the money. I believe he is in love with that Ma-Mee
and wants to keep her picture. _Mon Dieu!_ A well-established affection.
At least he is what the English call an odd fish, one whom I could never
make out, and of whom no one seems to know anything. Still, honest, I
am sure--quite honest. Why, he might have kept every one of those jewels
and no one have been the wiser. And what things! What a find! _Ciel!_
what a find! There has been nothing like it for years. Benedictions on
the head of Odd-fish Smith!"

Then he collected the precious objects, thrust them into an inner
compartment of his safe, which he locked and double-locked, and, as
it was nearly five o'clock, departed from the Museum to his private
residence in the grounds, there to study Smith's copies and photographs,
and to tell some friends of the great things that had happened.

When Smith found himself outside the sacred door, and had presented its
venerable guardian with a baksheesh of five piastres, he walked a few
paces to the right and paused a while to watch some native labourers
who were dragging a huge sarcophagus upon an improvised tramway. As they
dragged they sang an echoing rhythmic song, whereof each line ended with
an invocation to Allah.

Just so, reflected Smith, had their forefathers sung when, millenniums
ago, they dragged that very sarcophagus from the quarries to the Nile,
and from the Nile to the tomb whence it reappeared to-day, or when they
slid the casing blocks of the pyramids up the great causeway and smooth
slope of sand, and laid them in their dizzy resting-places. Only then
each line of the immemorial chant of toil ended with an invocation to
Amen, now transformed to Allah. The East may change its masters and
its gods, but its customs never change, and if to-day Allah wore the
feathers of Amen one wonders whether the worshippers would find the
difference so very great.

Thus thought Smith as he hurried away from the sarcophagus and those
blue-robed, dark-skinned fellaheen, down the long gallery that is filled
with a thousand sculptures. For a moment he paused before the wonderful
white statue of Queen Amenartas, then, remembering that