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"What if that strange tale which Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat told me of their visit to his house told, as I thought, to hide their failure under a veil of lies was true? If so, then he has passed the threshold and taken a place only a little lower than the seats of the gods, a place that I may not approach, barred by the penalty of my accursed folly and pride!
She saw a jug of water get up off the table and empty itself over her companion's face. Then she fainted, too. When Pent-Ah came to himself and sat up, he saw an elderly gentleman, tall and erect as a man in the prime of life, standing over him with the blackthorn in one hand and the water-jug in the other.
"We have seen her once more, Lord," said Pent-Ah, "scarce an hour ago, dressed after the fashion of these heathen English, and seated in a devil-chariot beside another woman, as fair almost as she. It is true, Lord, even as we said, that our Lady the Queen is in the flesh again, and yet she knows us not. It may be that the High Gods have laid some spell upon her."
Pent-Ah took them with a low obeisance, and dropped them one by one into a pocket in a canvas belt which he wore under his ragged waistcoat. Neb-Anat looked at them greedily as they disappeared. "The Master's commands shall be obeyed, and the High Gods shall be faithfully served," said Pent-Ah, as he straightened himself up again.
Now, O Pent-Ah, is our task much harder, yet will its accomplishment be all the more glorious for you and me, and greatly will our Lord reward us if we can restore to his keeping, not the ravished mummy of Nitocris, but the Queen herself, warm and breathing and beautiful, as she was in the ancient days of the great Rameses."
Know every movement that the Queen makes, and every day inform me by word or in writing of all her actions. On the fourth day from now come here an hour before midnight. Now go." He counted out five sovereigns to Pent-Ah. Their glitter contrasted strangely with the shabby squalor of the room and the poverty of his own dress, but he gave them as though they had been coppers.
So the hum died down as he went to the black-board, and Nitocris looked at Merrill with something like fear in her eyes. "If he does that," whispered Phadrig to the Prince in Russian, "the story that Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat told will be true which the High Gods forbid!"
Once they accepted the situation, they got to work with a quiet thoroughness which resulted in the spreading of an invisible but unbreakable net round the footsteps of every one of the suspects from the great Oscarovitch himself to the humble seller of curios in Candler's Court, and his still humbler friends Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat, who were known to the few who knew them as Mr and Mrs Pentana, renovators, and, possibly manufacturers, of ancient gems and relics.
As Pent-Ah closed the door and bolted it, he said to him in Coptic: "So ye have returned! What news of the Queen? For without that surely ye would not have dared to come before me."
They crossed the court diagonally and entered a house in the right-hand corner. They went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. Pent-Ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice slowly.
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