The thing we had come to see lay upon the table with an electric lamp burning directly over it. The effect was indescribably weird. All about in the shadows fantastic “lots” seemed to leer at us. A famous private collection was to be sold in the morning and a rank of mummies lined one wall, whilst, from another, stony Pharaohs, gods and goddesses scorned us through the gloom. We were a living group in a place of long-dead things. And yellow on the table beneath the white light, with partially unwrapped coils of discoloured linen hanging gruesomely from it, lay a headless mummy! I heard the spurt of Moris Klaw’s scent spray behind me, and a faint breath of verbena stole to my nostrils. “Pah!” came the rumbling voice; “this air is full of deadness!” “Good evening, Mr. Klaw,” said Grimsby, appearing from somewhere out of the gloom. “I am so glad you have come.” He bowed to Isis. “How do you do, Miss Klaw?” The bright green figure moved forward into the pool of light. I think I had never seen a more singular picture than that of Isis Klaw bending over the decapitated mummy. Indeed, the whole scene would have delighted Rembrandt. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Klaw,” said a middle-aged gentleman, stepping up to the curio dealer; “the Inspector has been telling me about you.” Moris Klaw bowed, and his daughter turned to him with a little nod of the head. “It is the same period,” she said, “as Mr. Pettigrew’s mummy. Possibly this was a priest of the same temple. Certainly both are of the same dynasty.” “It is instructive,” rumbled Moris Klaw, “but so confusing.” “It’s amazing, Mr. Klaw,” said Grimsby. “If I understand Miss Klaw rightly, this is the mummy of someone who lived at the same period as the priestess whose mummy is in Mr. Pettigrew’s possession?” “I do not trouble to look,” rumbled Moris Klaw, who, in fact, was staring all about the room. “If Isis has said so, it is so.” “If I happened to be superstitious,” said Grimsby, “I should think this was a sort of curse being fulfilled, or some fantastic thing of that sort.” “You should call a curse fantastic, eh, my friend?” said Moris Klaw. “Yet here in your own country you have seen a whole family that was cursed to be wiped out mysteriously. Am I with you?” Grimsby looked very perplexed. “There’s nothing very mysterious about how the thing was done,” he said. “Some madman got in here with a knife early in the evening. It’s always pretty dark, even during the daytime. But the mystery is his object.” “His object is a mystery, yes,” agreed Klaw. “I would sleep here in order to procure a mental negative of what he hoped or what he feared, this lunatic headsman, only that I know he is a man possessed.” “Possessed!” I cried; and even Isis looked surprised.