Seton turned, stooped on one knee to release the captive . . . and found himself looking into the face of someone who sat crouched upon the divan behind the Chief Inspector.  The figure was that of an oriental, richly robed.  Long, slim, ivory hands rested upon his knees, and on the first finger of the right hand gleamed a big talismanic ring.  But the face, surmounted by a white turban, was wonderful, arresting in its immobile intellectual beauty; and from under the heavy brows a pair of abnormally large eyes looked out hypnotically.

“My God!” whispered Seton, then: 

“If you’ve finished your short prayer,” rapped Kerry, “set about my little job.”

“But, Kerry—­Kerry, behind you!”

“I haven’t any eyes in my back hair!”

Mechanically, half fearfully, Seton touched the hands of the crouching oriental.  A low moan came from the woman in the bed, and: 

“It’s Kazmah!” gasped Seton.  “Kerry . . .  Kazmah is—­a wax figure!”

“Hell!” said Chief Inspector Kerry.

CHAPTER XLII

A YEAR LATER

Beneath an awning spread above the balcony of one of those modern elegant flats, which today characterize Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, site of perhaps the most ancient seat of learning in the known world, a party of four was gathered, awaiting the unique spectacle which is afforded when the sun’s dying rays fade from the Libyan sands and the violet wonder of the afterglow conjures up old magical Egypt from the ashes of the desert.

“Yes,” Monte Irvin was saying, “only a year ago; but, thank God, it seems more like ten!  Merciful time effaces sadness but spares joy.”

He turned to his wife, whose flower-like face peeped out from a nest of white fur.  Covertly he squeezed her hand, and was rewarded with a swift, half coquettish glance, in which he read trust and contentment.  The dreadful ordeal through which she had passed had accomplished that which no physician in Europe could have hoped for, since no physician would have dared to adopt such drastic measures.  Actuated by deliberate cruelty, and with the design of bringing about her death from apparently natural causes, the Kazmah group had deprived her of cocaine for so long a period that sanity, life itself, had barely survived; but for so long a period that, surviving, she had outlived the drug craving.  Kazmah had cured her!

Monte Irvin turned to the tall fair girl who sat upon the arm of a cane rest-chair beside Rita.

“But nothing can ever efface the memory of all you have done for Rita, and for me,” he said, “nothing, Mrs. Seton.”

“Oh,” said Margaret, “my mind was away back, and that sounded—­so odd.”

Seton Pasha, who occupied the lounge-chair upon the broad arm of which his wife was seated, looked up, smiling into the suddenly flushed face.  They were but newly returned from their honeymoon, and had just taken possession of their home, for Seton was now stationed in Cairo.  He flicked a cone of ash from his cheroot.