Sneering openly at a damaged Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, he reflected that some day he would confer upon that museum a relic transcending all others.  He saw it enshrined in a room by itself; it should never be demeaned by association with those rusty cadavers he saw about him.  This would be when he had passed on to another body, in accordance with the law of Karma.  He would leave a sum to the museum authorities, specifically to build this room, and to it would come thousands, for a glimpse of the superior Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period, surviving in a state calculated to impress every beholder with his singular merits.  Ram-tah, cheated of his place in history’s pantheon, should here at last come into his own; serene, beauteous, majestic, looking every inch a king, where mere Pharaohs looked like—­like the coffee-stained, untidy fragments they were.

He left the place in a tolerant mood.  He had weighed himself with the other great dead of the world.

That night he sat again before this old king, staring until he lost himself, staring as he had before stared into the depths of his shell.  The shell, when he had looked steadily at it for a long time, had always seemed to put him in close touch with unknown forces.  He had once tried to explain this to his Aunt Clara, who understood nearly everything, but his effort had been clumsy enough and had brought her no enlightenment.  “You look into it—­and it makes you feel!” was all he had been able to tell her.

But the shell was now discarded for the puissant person of Ram-tah.  The message was more pointed.  He drew power from the old dead face that yet seemed so living.  He was himself a wise and good king.  No longer could he play the coward before trivial adversities.  He would direct large affairs; he would live big.  Never again would he be afraid of death or Breede or policemen or the mockery of his fellows—­or women!  He might still avoid the latter, but not in terror; only in a dignified dread lest they talk and spoil it all.

He would choose, in due time, a worthy consort, and a certain Crown Prince would, in further due time, startle the world with his left-handed pitching.  It was a prospect all golden to dream upon.  His spirit grew tall and its fibre toughened.

To be sure, he did not achieve a kingly disregard for public opinion all in one day.  There was the matter of that scarlet cravat.  Monday morning he excavated it from the bottom of the trunk, where it lay beside “Napoleon, Man and Lover.”  He even adjusted it, carelessly pretending that it was just any cravat, the first that had come to hand.  But its colour was still too alarming. It—­so he usually thought of the great Ram-tah—­would have worn the cravat without a tremor, but It had been born a king.  One glance at the thing about his neck had vividly recalled the awkward circumstance that, to the world at large, he was still Bunker Bean, a youth incapable of flaunt or flourish.