. This shape or outline once
secured, could then be made permanent--a mould for its return at
will--its natural physical expression here on earth."

"Idol!" he exclaimed.

"Image," she replied at once. "Life, before we can know it, must have a
body. Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle."

"And--to obtain this form or outline?" he began; "to fix it, rather?"

"Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on--some one
not engaged in the actual evocation. This form, accurately made
permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always
open. Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. The cisterns of
Power behind would be accessible."

"An amazing proposition!" Henriot exclaimed. What surprised him was that
he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.

"Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vance
like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his
interruption--a touch of darkness. He spoke eagerly.

To all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriot
listened with but half an ear. This one idea stormed through him with an
uproar that killed attention. Judgment was held utterly in abeyance. He
carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted at
previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she came to
Egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lost
clues. And he recalled afterwards that she said, "This all came to me as
a child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was the
further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they,
too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the
rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered,
hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep
down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty
phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to escape and be
alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himself
and went upstairs to bed. The halls, he noticed, were empty; an Arab
servant waited to put the lights out. He walked up, for the lift had
long ceased running.

And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The studies that had
fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had
subdued his mind in boyhood. The cult of Osiris woke in his blood again;
Horus