nking of doing any more work,
then?"

"Work!" Antony Ferrara smiled and sank upon a heap of cushions.
"Forgive me, Cairn, but I leave it, gladly and confidently, to more
robust characters such as your own."

He proffered a silver box of cigarettes, but Cairn shook his head,
balancing himself on a corner of the table.

"No; thanks. I have smoked too much already; my tongue is parched."

"My dear fellow!" Ferrara rose. "I have a wine which, I declare, you
will never have tasted but which you will pronounce to be nectar. It
is made in Cyprus--"

Cairn raised his hand in a way that might have reminded a nice
observer of his father.

"Thank you, nevertheless. Some other time, Ferrara; I am no wine man."

"A whisky and soda, or a burly British B. and S., even a sporty
'Scotch and Polly'?"

There was a suggestion of laughter in the husky voice, now, of a sort
of contemptuous banter. But Cairn stolidly shook his head and forced a
smile.

"Many thanks; but it's too early."

He stood up and began to walk about the room, inspecting the
numberless oddities which it contained. The photographs he examined
with supercilious curiosity. Then, passing to a huge cabinet, he began
to peer in at the rows of amulets, statuettes and other,
unclassifiable, objects with which it was laden. Ferrara's voice came.

"That head of a priestess on the left, Cairn, is of great interest.
The brain had not been removed, and quite a colony of Dermestes
Beetles had propagated in the cavity. Those creatures never saw the
light, Cairn. Yet I assure you that they had eyes. I have nearly forty
of them in the small glass case on the table there. You might like to
examine them."

Cairn shuddered, but felt impelled to turn and look at these gruesome
relics. In a square, glass case he saw the creatures. They lay in rows
on a bed of moss; one might almost have supposed that unclean life yet
survived in the little black insects. They were an unfamiliar species
to Cairn, being covered with unusually long, black hair, except upon
the root of the wing-cases where they were of brilliant orange.

"The perfect pupae of this insect are extremely rare," added Ferrara
informatively.

"Indeed?" replied Cairn.

He found something physically revolting in that group of beetles whose
history had begun and ended in the skull of a mummy.

"Filthy things!" he said. "Why do you keep them?"

Ferrara shrugged his shoulders.

"Who knows?" he answered enigmatical