“And is he not?” queried Gervase, ironically.  “Fair Princess, I would not willingly shake your faith in things unseen, but what does the ‘Eternal God,’ as you call Him, care as to the destiny of any individual unit on this globe of matter?  Does He interfere when the murderer’s knife descends upon the victim?  And has He ever interfered?  He it is who created the sexes and placed between them the strong attraction that often works more evil and misery than good; and what barrier has He ever interposed between woman and man, her natural destroyer?  None!—­save the trifling one of virtue, which is a flimsy thing, and often breaks down at the first temptation.  No, my dear Princess; the ‘Eternal God,’ if there is one, does nothing but look on impassively at the universal havoc of creation.  And in the blindness and silence of things, I cannot recognize an Eternal God at all; we were evidently made to eat, drink, breed and die—­and there an end.”

“What of ambition?” asked Dr. Dean.  “What of the inspiration that lifts a man beyond himself and his material needs, and teaches him to strive after the Highest?”

“Mere mad folly!” replied Gervase impetuously.  “Take the Arts.  I, for example, dream of painting a picture that shall move the world to admiration,—­but I seldom grasp the idea I have imagined.  I paint something,—­anything,—­and the world gapes at it, and some rich fool buys it, leaving me free to paint another something; and so on and so on, to the end of my career.  I ask you what satisfaction does it bring?  What is it to Raphael that thousands of human units, cultured and silly, have stared at his ‘Madonnas’ and his famous Cartoons?”

“Well, we do not exactly know what it may or may not be to Raphael,” said the Doctor, meditatively.  “According to my theories, Raphael is not dead, but merely removed into another form, on another planet possibly, and is working elsewhere.  You might as well ask what it is to Araxes now that he was a famous warrior once?”

Gervase moved uneasily.

“You have got Araxes on the brain, Doctor,” he said, with a forced smile, “and in our conversation we are forgetting that the Princess has promised to tell us a fairytale, the story of the Great Pyramid.”

The Princess looked at him, then at Denzil Murray, and lastly at Dr. Dean.

“Would you really care to hear it?” she asked.

“Most certainly!” they all three answered.

She rose from the dinner-table.

“Come here to the window,” she said.  “You can see the great structure now, in the dusky light,—­look at it well and try, if you can, to realize that deep, deep down in the earth on which it stands is a connected gallery of rocky caves wherein no human foot has ever penetrated since the Deluge swept over the land and made a desert of all the old-time civilization!”

Her slight figure appeared to dilate as she spoke, raising one slender hand and arm to point at the huge mass that towered up against the clear, starlit sky.  Her listeners were silent, awed and attentive.