“Protoplasm—­mere protoplasm!” he murmured.  “The germ of soul has not yet attained to individual consciousness in any one of these strange bipeds.  Their thoughts are as jelly,—­their reasoning powers in embryo,—­their intellectual faculties barely perceptible.  Yet they are interesting, viewed in the same light and considered on the same scale as fish or insects merely.  As men and women of course they are misnomers,—­laughable impossibilities.  Well, well!—­in the space of two or three thousand years, the protoplasm may start into form out of the void, and the fibres of a conscious Intellectuality may sprout,—­ but it will have to be in some other phase of existence—­certainly not in this one.  And now to shut myself up and write my memoranda--for I must not lose a single detail of this singular Egyptian psychic problem.  The whole thing I perceive is rounding itself towards completion and catastrophe—­but in what way?  How will it—­ how can it end?”

And with a meditative frown puckering his brows, Dr. Dean folded his hands behind his back and retired to his own room, from whence he did not emerge all day.

Armand Gervase in the meanwhile was making himself the life and soul of everything at the Mena House Hotel.  He struck up an easy acquaintance with several of the visitors staying there,—­said pretty things to young women and pleasant things to old,—­and in the course of a few hours succeeded in becoming the most popular personage in the place.  He accepted invitations to parties, and agreed to share in various’ excursions, till he engaged himself for every day in the coming week, and was so gay and gallant and fascinating in manner and bearing that fair ladies lost their hearts to him at a glance, and what amusement or pleasure there was at the Mena House seemed to be doubly enhanced by the mere fact of his presence.  In truth Gervase was in a singular mood of elation and excitation; a strong inward triumph possessed him and filled his soul with an imperious pride and sense of conquest which, for the time being, made him feel as though he were a very king of men.  There was nothing in his nature of the noble tenderness which makes the lover mentally exalt his beloved as a queen before whom he is content to submit his whole soul in worship; what he realized was merely this:  that here was one of the most beautiful and seductive women ever created, in the person of the Princess Ziska, and that he, Gervase, meant to possess that loveliest of women, whatever happened in the near or distant future.  Of her, and of the influence of his passion on her personally, he did not stop to think, except with the curiously blind egotism which is the heritage of most men, and which led him to judge that her happiness would in some way or other be enhanced by his brief and fickle love.  For, as a rule, men do not understand love.  They understand desire, amounting sometimes to merciless covetousness for what they cannot get,—­this is a leading