And, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then and there.  It came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified; and it came in this unexpected fashion: 

Behind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran—­fear:  but behind the vivid fear ran another thing that Henriot now perceived was vile.  For the first time in his life, Henriot knew it at close quarters, actual, ready to operate.  Though familiar enough in daily life to be of common occurrence, Henriot had never realised it as he did now, so close and terrible.  In the same way he had never realised that he would die—­vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as though he had never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust.  And in the man named Richard Vance this thing was close upon blossom.  Henriot could not name it to himself.  Even in thought it appalled him.

* * * * *

He undressed hurriedly, almost with the child’s idea of finding safety between the sheets.  His mind undressed itself as well.  The business of the day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grew inactive.  Henriot was exhausted.  But, in that stage towards slumber when thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind in shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations, and his soul unveiled a peering eye.  Great limbs of memory, smothered by the activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths through the sands of long ago—­sands this woman had begun to excavate from some far-off pre-existence they had surely known together.  Vagueness and certainty ran hand in hand.  Details were unrecoverable, but the emotions in which they were embedded moved.

He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and follow them.  But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they retired instantly into the subconsciousness.  With the brain of this body he now occupied they had nothing to do.  The brain stored memories of each life only.  This ancient script was graven in his soul.  Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal.  And it was his subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.

Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge.  Against the darker background of Vance’s fear and sinister purpose—­both of this present life, and recent—­he saw the grandeur of this woman’s impossible dream, and knew, beyond argument or reason, that it was true.  Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and took the grandeur.  The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity and superstition; it was Memory.  Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt, hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know physical expression in a group—­in many.  Their sphere of bodily manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a corpuscle in the whole.