e taken
for granted by the family. If you will let me examine them with you it
will be delightful!"

It was a joy to me to hear her talk in such a way; and her last
suggestion quite thrilled me. Together we went round the various rooms
and passages, examining and admiring the magnificent curios. There was
such a bewildering amount and variety of objects that we could only
glance at most of them; but as we went along we arranged that we should
take them seriatim, day by day, and examine them more closely. In the
hall was a sort of big frame of floriated steel work which Margaret
said her father used for lifting the heavy stone lids of the
sarcophagi. It was not heavy and could be moved about easily enough.
By aid of this we raised the covers in turn and looked at the endless
series of hieroglyphic pictures cut in most of them. In spite of her
profession of ignorance Margaret knew a good deal about them; her year
of life with her father had had unconsciously its daily and hourly
lesson. She was a remarkably clever and acute-minded girl, and with a
prodigious memory; so that her store of knowledge, gathered
unthinkingly bit by bit, had grown to proportions that many a scholar
might have envied.

And yet it was all so naive and unconscious; so girlish and simple.
She was so fresh in her views and ideas, and had so little thought of
self, that in her companionship I forgot for the time all the troubles
and mysteries which enmeshed the house; and I felt like a boy again....

The most interesting of the sarcophagi were undoubtedly the three in
Mr. Trelawny's room. Of these, two were of dark stone, one of porphyry
and the other of a sort of ironstone. These were wrought with some
hieroglyphs. But the third was strikingly different. It was of some
yellow-brown substance of the dominating colour effect of Mexican onyx,
which it resembled in many ways, excepting that the natural pattern of
its convolutions was less marked. Here and there were patches almost
transparent--certainly translucent. The whole chest, cover and all,
was wrought with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of minute hieroglyphics,
seemingly in an endless series. Back, front, sides, edges, bottom, all
had their quota of the dainty pictures, the deep blue of their
colouring showing up fresh and sharply edge in the yellow stone. It
was very long, nearly nine feet; and perhaps a yard wide. The sides
undulated, so that there was no hard line. Even the c