“Tell them you say they can’t?” questioned Jinny a little helplessly.

“No—­no—­not that.  Tell them you are using the room; tell them,” said Ryder with very brisk and serious inspiration, “tell them your petticoat is coming off!”

“Why Jack Ryder!” said Jinny indignantly.

“Nonsense,” said he to her indignation.  “Don’t you remember when your aunt’s petticoat came off on the way to church?  It happens.”

“But it doesn’t run in families!”

Her protest fell apparently upon the back of his head.  He had turned to the last sarcophagus and was slipping his fingers beneath the lid.  “Here, Andy,” he said quickly.  “I had it wedged so it wasn’t tight shut, but it’s been so infernally hot and dusty—­”

He was tremendously troubled.  It was not the heat which had brought those fine beads of moisture to his brow, white above the line of brown, and drawn such a pale ring about his mouth.  McLean saw that the slim, wiry wrists which supported the case’s top were shaking.

“Gently now,” he murmured and the lid was lifted and laid aside.

The same dark, unstirring form of the tomb scene.  The same dry, dusty little mummy....  But with hands strangely reckless for an archaeologist dealing with the priceless stuff of time Ryder tore at those bandages; he unwrapped, he unwound, and in a lightning’s flash—­

To McLean’s tense, expectant nerves it was like a scene at the pantomime.  He had divined it; he had foreseen and yet there was the shock and eerie thrill of magic, the appealing unreality of the supernatural in the revelation.

In a wave of an enchanter’s wand the mummy was gone.  And in its place lay a Sleeping Beauty, the dark hair in sculptured closeness to the head, the long, black lashes sweeping the still cheeks.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE PAINTED CASE

“She’s fainted,” said Ryder in a voice that shook.  From his pocket he drew swiftly a thermos bottle but before the top was off those long lashes fluttered, and from under their shadow the soft, dark eyes looked up at him with a smile of very gallant reassurance.

“Not—­faint,” said the girl, in a breath of a voice.  “But it was so long—­so hot—­”

“Drink this.”  Ryder slipped an arm about her, offering the filled top of the thermos.  “It’s over, all over,” he murmured as she drank.  “You’re safe now, safe....  You’re at the museum....  Then we’ll get you to the hotel—­”

“Hotel—?” the girl echoed with a faint implication of humor in that silver bell of a voice.

She put her hands to her hair and to her face in which the hues of life mingled with the pallor of exhaustion; on her small fingers sparkled the gleam of diamonds and from her slender arms fell back the gold and jade tissues of her chiffon robe.

To McLean she had increasingly the appearance of a creature of enchantments.  And to see that young loveliness in its strange gleam of color lying against his friend’s supporting tan linen arm—­