“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully.  “Father’s instructions seem very uncompromising.”  Then after a pause she went on:  “But of course under the circumstances anything that is to be ultimately for his good must be done.  I suppose there can’t be anything very particular about the mummy of a cat.”

Doctor Winchester said nothing.  He sat rigid, with so grave a look on his face that his extra gravity passed on to me; and in its enlightening perturbation I began to realise more than I had yet done the strangeness of the case in which I was now so deeply concerned.  When once this thought had begun there was no end to it.  Indeed it grew, and blossomed, and reproduced itself in a thousand different ways.  The room and all in it gave grounds for strange thoughts.  There were so many ancient relics that unconsciously one was taken back to strange lands and strange times.  There were so many mummies or mummy objects, round which there seemed to cling for ever the penetrating odours of bitumen, and spices and gums—­“Nard and Circassia’s balmy smells”—­that one was unable to forget the past.  Of course, there was but little light in the room, and that carefully shaded; so that there was no glare anywhere.  None of that direct light which can manifest itself as a power or an entity, and so make for companionship.  The room was a large one, and lofty in proportion to its size.  In its vastness was place for a multitude of things not often found in a bedchamber.  In far corners of the room were shadows of uncanny shape.  More than once as I thought, the multitudinous presence of the dead and the past took such hold on me that I caught myself looking round fearfully as though some strange personality or influence was present.  Even the manifest presence of Doctor Winchester and Miss Trelawny could not altogether comfort or satisfy me at such moments.  It was with a distinct sense of relief that I saw a new personality in the room in the shape of Nurse Kennedy.  There was no doubt that that business-like, self-reliant, capable young woman added an element of security to such wild imaginings as my own.  She had a quality of common sense that seemed to pervade everything around her, as though it were some kind of emanation.  Up to that moment I had been building fancies around the sick man; so that finally all about him, including myself, had become involved in them, or enmeshed, or saturated, or. . .  But now that she had come, he relapsed into his proper perspective as a patient; the room was a sick-room, and the shadows lost their fearsome quality.  The only thing which it could not altogether abrogate was the strange Egyptian smell.  You may put a mummy in a glass case and hermetically seal it so that no corroding air can get within; but all the same it will exhale its odour.  One might think that four or five thousand years would exhaust the olfactory qualities of anything; but experience teaches us that these smells remain, and that their secrets are unknown to us.  Today they are as much mysteries as they were when the embalmers put the body in the bath of natron. . .