ch greater sensation in the
papers.

Nicol Hendry was reading the paragraph about the same time. His eyes
contracted, and he stroked his beard with slow motions of his hand. The
hand was steady, but even his nerves quivered a little. He divined
instantly how the suicide-murder had been brought about, and this very
fact, coupled with the absolute impossibility of proving anything, made
the affair all the more disquieting.

"So that is the sort of thing we've got to fight, is it? I don't like
it. Still, it goes far to prove that the Professor was perfectly right
when he told me to keep a sharp eye on Mr Phadrig Amena."

CHAPTER XX

THROUGH THE CENTURIES

As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat
tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly
palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to
Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days
more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg,
so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as
Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the
centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village
of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the
thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty
Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last
tower in 1880.

During the journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen, Nitocris, reclining
comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving
car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary
experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them
not only extraordinary, but also very curious. She had already learnt
that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the
border had been passed, was Will: but Will of a far more intense and
exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to
action on the lower plane. There was naturally something that seemed
extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the
present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the
past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like "the airy fabric of a
vision," and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past
from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages,
or the future from the wom