e statuette, also of red stone, which was suspended from
the centre of the necklace, suggested that this was so, for it may well
have been a likeness of one of the great gods of the Egyptians, the
infant Horus, the son of Isis.

"That is the necklace I saw which the Ivory Child gave me in my dream,"
said Miss Holmes quietly.

Then with much deliberation she clasped it round her throat.

CHAPTER V

THE PLOT

The sequel to the events of this evening may be told very briefly and of
it the reader can form his own judgment. I narrate it as it happened.

That night I did not sleep at all well. It may have been because of the
excitement of the great shoot in which I found myself in competition
with another man whom I disliked and who had defrauded me in the past,
to say nothing of its physical strain in cold and heavy weather. Or it
may have been that my imagination was stirred by the arrival of that
strange pair, Harut and Marut, apparently in search of myself, seven
thousand miles away from any place where they can have known aught of an
insignificant individual with a purely local repute. Or it may have been
that the pictures which they showed me when under the influence of
the fumes of their "tobacco"--or of their hypnotism--took an undue
possession of my brain.

Or lastly, the strange coincidence that the beautiful betrothed of my
host should have related to me a tale of her childhood of which she
declared she had never spoken before, and that within an hour the two
principal actors in that tale should have appeared before my eyes and
hers (for I may state that from the beginning I had no doubt that
they were the same men), moved me and filled me with quite natural
foreboding. Or all these things together may have tended to a
concomitant effect. At any rate the issue was that I could not sleep.

For hour after hour I lay thinking and in an irritated way listening for
the chimes of the Ragnall stable-clock which once had adorned the tower
of the church and struck the quarters with a damnable reiteration. I
concluded that Messrs. Harut and Marut were a couple of common Arab
rogues such as I had seen performing at the African ports. Then a
quarter struck and I concluded that the elephants' cemetery which I
beheld in the smoke undoubtedly existed and that I meant to collar those
thousands of pounds' worth of ivory before I died. Then after another
quarter I concluded that there was no elephants' cemetery--althoug