I would have given the world for a confidant; but this was impossible.  How could I speak a doubt of Margaret to anyone, even her father!  How could I speak a doubt to Margaret, when Margaret herself was the theme!  I could only endure—­and hope.  And of the two the endurance was the lesser pain.

I think that Margaret must have at times felt that there was some cloud between us, for towards the end of the first day she began to shun me a little; or perhaps it was that she had become more diffident that usual about me.  Hitherto she had sought every opportunity of being with me, just as I had tried to be with her; so that now any avoidance, one of the other, made a new pain to us both.

On this day the household seemed very still.  Each one of us was about his own work, or occupied with his own thoughts.  We only met at meal times; and then, though we talked, all seemed more or less preoccupied.  There was not in the house even the stir of the routine of service.  The precaution of Mr. Trelawny in having three rooms prepared for each of us had rendered servants unnecessary.  The dining-room was solidly prepared with cooked provisions for several days.  Towards evening I went out by myself for a stroll.  I had looked for Margaret to ask her to come with me; but when I found her, she was in one of her apathetic moods, and the charm of her presence seemed lost to me.  Angry with myself, but unable to quell my own spirit of discontent, I went out alone over the rocky headland.

On the cliff, with the wide expanse of wonderful sea before me, and no sound but the dash of waves below and the harsh screams of the seagulls above, my thoughts ran free.  Do what I would, they returned continuously to one subject, the solving of the doubt that was upon me.  Here in the solitude, amid the wide circle of Nature’s force and strife, my mind began to work truly.  Unconsciously I found myself asking a question which I would not allow myself to answer.  At last the persistence of a mind working truly prevailed; I found myself face to face with my doubt.  The habit of my life began to assert itself, and I analysed the evidence before me.

It was so startling that I had to force myself into obedience to logical effort.  My starting-place was this:  Margaret was changed—­in what way, and by what means?  Was it her character, or her mind, or her nature? for her physical appearance remained the same.  I began to group all that I had ever heard of her, beginning at her birth.

It was strange at the very first.  She had been, according to Corbeck’s statement, born of a dead mother during the time that her father and his friend were in a trance in the tomb at Aswan.  That trance was presumably effected by a woman; a woman mummied, yet preserving as we had every reason to believe from after experience, an astral body subject to a free will and an active intelligence.  With that astral body, space ceased to exist.  The vast distance between London and Aswan became as naught; and whatever power of necromancy the Sorceress had might have been exercised over the dead mother, and possibly the dead child.