me but a collocation of maledictory words, harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here assumed an actual corporeal shape.  In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril’s studio.

‘It is an illusion,’ I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; ’it is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted stomach.’  Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason had accepted it as real.  Against this foe I seemed to be fighting towards my father’s coffin as a dreamer lights against a nightmare, and At last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish bones in a corner of the crypt.  The candle fell from my lantern, and I was in darkness.  As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious state.  I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the ‘Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,’ scattering seeds over the earth below.  At the pyramid’s base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading with the Queen of Death: 

       What answer, O Nin-ki-gal? 
       Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

And the Sibyl’s face was that of Fenella Stanley—­her voice was that of Sinfi Lovell.

And then from that dizzy height seemed to come a cackling laugh:—­

‘You makes me blush, an’ blow me if blushin’ ain’t bin an’ made t’other eye dry.  I lives in Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, an’ my reg’lar perfession is a-sellin’ coffee “so airly in the mornin’,” and I’ve got a darter as ain’t quite so ‘ansom as me, bein’ the moral of her father.’

And now in my vision I perceived that Nin-ki-gal’s face was that of the old woman I had seen in Cyril’s studio, and that she was dressed in the same fantastic in which Cyril had bedizened her.

VI

I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached the coffin resting on a stone table.  I found, on examining it, that although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free.  Then I paused; for to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the blood’s inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a giant.  Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff’s story, which at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between Winnie’s father and mine seemed to hang in the air—­a fascinating mirage of ghastly horror.

* * * * *