Plane too, so, of course, she can't be
dead----"

And then with the force of a powerful electric shock, the terrible fact
struck him that, for those who had reached that plane, there was no
death! Here was a new light on the weird problem which he had somehow
been called upon to deal with.

"I wonder what Her Majesty would really think of it?" he murmured, after
a few moments of mental bewilderment. "Dear me, who's that?"

He looked up, and, to his utter amazement, he saw Queen Nitocris,
arrayed exactly as she had been on that terrible night of her bridal
with Menkau-Ra, walking towards him; a perfect incarnation of beauty,
but----

"Oh dear me!" said the Professor, "this will never do. Good heavens!
everybody in Wimbledon knows me, and--well, of course, Her Majesty is
very lovely and all that; but what on earth would people think if any
one saw me strolling across the Common in company with an Egyptian
Queen--to say nothing of the costume--and the image of my own daughter,
too!"

The figure approached, and the Queen, dazzlingly and bewilderingly
beautiful, held out her hands to him, and their eyes met and they looked
at each other across the gulf of fifty centuries. Impelled by an
irresistible impulse coming from whence he knew not, he clasped them in
his, and said, apparently by no volition of his own, in the Ancient
Tongue:

"Ma-Rim[=o]n greets Nitocris, the Queen! What hath he done that he
should be once more so highly honoured?"

At that moment a carriage came by along the road quite close to them.
Two of its occupants were looking straight towards them. They passed
without taking the slightest notice, as they must have done had they
seen such a marvellous figure as that of the Queen. And then he
remembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of N3 could
see her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herself
visible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lower
Plane of Existence. These things were quickly becoming more plain to his
comprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not a
lesson to be learnt very easily.

"Welcome, Ma-Rim[=o]n," replied the Queen, in a voice which filled him
with many distant and strange memories, "but let there be no talk
between us of honour, for in this state there is neither honour nor
dishonour, neither ruler nor subject, neither good nor evil, since all
these are absorbed in the Perfect Knowledge. Yet it is the