Here then was the reason for all these erasures: there had been a scandal about the intimacy between this “common man” and the Queen; so, when she died, and her nephew succeeded, he caused all mention of Sen-mut to be erased, and covered up the blank spaces with majestic records of his own achievements. It was his design to destroy all evidence of this disreputable or at least undignified affair, and hammer and chisel, at his order, were busy to delete all hint of Aunt Hatasoo’s indiscretions. Pious King Thothmes was all but successful in this piece of family pride: only just one record escaped his erasing hand. But now, four thousand years later, Maggie dug up that solitary omission. I know that there must have been clouds on these halcyon days of winter, but they passed and prevailing sunlight was dominant again. Once Maggie got a chill as she lingered by the horse-shoe lake, and developed a congestion of the lungs, but when she was allowed to leave her bed again and go out, she was carried in a sort of litter, by her own express decree, to the beloved excavation again, and made a delighted progress round the fresh clearing, ordering that some mason must be at once employed in piecing together the huge lion-headed statues which had been discovered in the fore-court of the temple, and in setting them in place again. She was more dubious about certain abominable baboons that crouched in a small chamber within the temple, whose awful ugliness seemed better left alone.... Then over us both passed the cloud of slightly disquieting letters from my mother. My father was overtired, and _Would_ go on working: he had attacks of breathlessness if he rode, a sense of oppression on his chest that was not mitigated by his remedy of thumping it. But no one, least of all the sufferer, took these things at all seriously. Maggie got better, my father received no alarming report from his doctor, and my mother, as these clouds seemed to melt, added them to her general list of the workings of “unreasonable fear,” that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was for ever combating and holding at arm’s length, but never quite slaying.