and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand."

How keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly
she made the little word resound. The syllable drew out almost into
chanting. Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and
on across some desert of forgotten belief. Veils of sand flew everywhere
about his mind. Curtains lifted. Whole hills of sand went shifting into
level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the
sunlight.

"But the sand may be removed." It was her nephew, speaking almost for
the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a
sharply practical element. For the tone expressed, so far as he dared
express it, disapproval. It was a baited observation, an invitation to
opinion.

"We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot," put in Lady Statham, before he
decided to respond. "Our object is quite another one; and I believe--I
have a feeling," she added almost questioningly, "that you might be
interested enough to help us perhaps."

He only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. Its bluntness
hardly surprised him. He felt himself leap forward to accept it. A
sudden subsidence had freed his feet.

Then the warning operated suddenly--for an instant. Henriot _was_
interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to
be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. That shrinking
dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question
it. His eyes looked full at Lady Statham. "What is it that you know?"
they asked her. "Tell me the things we once knew together, you and I.
These words are merely trifling. And why does another man now stand in
my place? For the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is
_you_ who are moving them away."

His soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the
words he used seemed oddly chosen:

"There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me ever
since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything
definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their
conceptions--a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call
it perhaps. I _am_ interested."

Her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave
conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them
into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot
that he was speaking with a wom