rather than loved the Professor, and who desired him more as a companion than as a husband.  With Braddock she did not arrange a romantic marriage so much as enter into a congenial partnership.  She wanted a man in the house, and he desired freedom from pecuniary embarrassment.  On these lines the prosaic bargain was struck, and Mrs. Kendal became the Professor’s wife with entirely successful results.  She gave her husband a home, and her child a father, who became fond of Lucy, and who—­considering he was merely an amateur parent—­acted admirably.

But this sensible partnership lasted only for five years.  Mrs. Braddock died of a chill on the liver and left her five hundred a year to the Professor for life, with remainder to Lucy, then a small girl of ten.  It was at this critical moment that Braddock became a practical man for the first and last time in his dreamy life.  He buried his wife with unfeigned regret—­for he had been sincerely attached to her in his absent-minded way—­and sent Lucy to a Hampstead boarding school.  After an interview with his late wife’s lawyer to see that the income was safe, he sought for a house in the country, and quickly discovered Gartley Grange, which no one would take because of its isolation.  Within three months from the burial of Mrs. Braddock, the widower had removed himself and his collection to Gartley, and had renamed his new abode the Pyramids.  Here he dwelt quietly and enjoyably—­from his dry-as-dust point of view—­for ten years, and here Lucy Kendal had come when her education was completed.  The arrival of a marriageable young lady made no difference in the Professor’s habits, and he hailed her thankfully as the successor to her mother in managing the small establishment.  It is to be feared that Braddock was somewhat selfish in his views, but the fixed idea of archaeological research made him egotistical.

The mansion was three-story, flat-roofed, extremely ugly and unexpectedly comfortable.  Built of mellow red brick with dingy white stone facings, it stood a few yards back from the roadway which ran from Gartley Fort through the village, and, at the precise point where the Pyramids was situated, curved abruptly through woodlands to terminate a mile away, at Jessum, the local station of the Thames Railway Line.  An iron railing, embedded in moldering stone work, divided the narrow front garden from the road, and on either side of the door—­which could be reached by five shallow steps—­grew two small yew trees, smartly clipped and trimmed into cones of dull green.  These yews possessed some magical significance, which Professor Braddock would occasionally explain to chance visitors interested in occult matters; for, amongst other things Egyptian, the archaeologist searched into the magic of the Sons of Khem, and insisted that there was more truth than superstition in their enchantments.