For an uncertain moment she stood just within the hall, bathed in the light that shone through from her apartments.  Then she closed the door and walked toward the veil.  As she came through the shafts of light from the windows, her gown was stained with crimson spots.  She was at the altar now, and Simpkins could no longer see her without changing his position.  Stealthily he edged along, careless of the statue just behind him.  As he parted the folds of the veil he saw that the altar was heaped with flowers.  Just beyond, the light playing fantastically on her upturned face, stood Mrs. Athelstone.

Simpkins closed the veil abruptly.  There came to him the remembrance of the time when the boy had pulled the cat’s tail, her anger and her curious exclamation; and again, the repetition of it in his case, when he had handled the mummy of Amosis roughly; and her affectation of Egyptian symbols as ornaments.  “She’s the simon-pure Blavatsky, all right,” he concluded, as he pieced these things into what he had just seen.  “All others are base imitations.”

The reporter had gathered from his little reading that behind these monstrous gods and this complex symbolism there was something near akin to Christianity in a few great essentials, and he understood how a woman of Mrs. Athelstone’s temperament, engrossed in the study of these things and living in these surroundings, might be affected by them.  Even he, shrewd, hard Yankee that he was, had felt the influence of the place, and there was that behind him then which made his heart beat quicker at the thought.

When he looked out again Mrs. Athelstone was gone.  He was impatient to get to his work in the storeroom; but first he peeped out again to make sure that she had returned to her room.  She was still in the hall, walking about in the corner where she ordinarily worked.  There was something methodical in her movements now that woke a new interest in Simpkins.  “What the dickens can she be up to?” he thought.

She had lit a lamp, and had shaded it, so that its rays were contracted in a circle on the floor.  From a cupboard let into the wall she was taking bottles and brushes, a roll of linen bandages and some boxes of pigments.  After laying these on the floor, she walked over to the big black mummy case by her table, and pushed until she had turned it around with its face to the wall.

What heathen game was this?  Simpkins’ interest increased, and he poked his head out boldly from the sheltering veil.

Mrs. Athelstone was standing directly in front of the case now, pulling and tugging in an effort to bring it down on her shoulders.  Finally, she managed to tilt it toward her, and then, straining, she lowered it until it rested flat on the floor.

“Sorry I couldn’t have lent a hand,” thought the gallant Simpkins; “the old buck must weigh a ton.  Now what’s she bothering around that passe, three-thousand-years-dead sport for?”