In his earlier and more active days, Manetho had lived and worked throughout the whole extent of this study, and it had been kept clean and orderly to its remotest corner.  But as years passed, and the range of his sympathies and activities narrowed, the ends of the room had gradually fallen into dusty neglect, till at length only the small space about the chair and table was left clear and available.  The rest was impeded by books, instruments of science, and endless chaotic rubbish; while spiders had handed down their ever-broadening estates from father to child, through innumerable Araneidaean generations.  A gray uniformity had thus come to overspread everything; and with the exceptions of a cracked celestial globe, and the end of a worm-eaten old ladder, there was nothing to catch the attention.

Here might the Egyptian indulge himself in whatever extravagances of word or act he chose, secure from sight or hearing; and here had he spent many an hour in such solitary exercises as no sane mind can conceive.  To him the room was thick with associations.  Here had he pursued his studies, or helped the Doctor in his erratic experiments and research; here, with Helen in his thoughts, he had shaped out a career,—­not all of Christian humility and charity, perhaps, but at least unstained by positive sin, and not unmindful of domestic happiness.  Here, again, had Salome visited him, bringing discord and delight in equal parts; for at times, with the strong heat of youth, he had vowed to love only her and to forsake ambition; and anon the bloodless counsels of worldly power and welfare banished her with a curse for having crossed his path.  Head and heart were always at war in Manetho.  The talismanic diamond flashed or waned, and fiercely wriggled the little fighting serpents.

At length Thor Helwyse’s gauntlet was thrown into the ring; and peace—­if still present to outward seeming—­abode not in the feverish soul of the Egyptian.  But it was his nature to dissemble.  In this room he had often outwatched the night, chewing the cud of his wrongs, invoking vengeance upon the thwarter of his hopes, and swearing through his teeth to even the balance between them.  The black serpent held the golden one helpless in his coils.  The obtuse Doctor, blundering in at morning, would find his adopted son with pallid cheeks and glittering eyes, but ever ready with a smile and pleasant greeting, obedience and help.  Hiero Glyphic, however wayward and cross-grained, never had cause to censure this creature of his,—­to remind him that he might have been food for crocodiles.