"Thy saying is near akin to blasphemy, Neb-Anat," he murmured in reply, "and yet there may be a deep meaning in it. Nevertheless, to-night, nay, this hour, the Master must know of what we have seen." They walked along, conversing in murmurs, as far as Waterloo Bridge, then they turned and crossed it and walked down Waterloo Road into the Borough Road, and then turned off into a narrow, grimy street which ended in a small court whose three sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. 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. Then came the sound of the drawing of a bolt, and the door opened. They went in with shuffling feet and crouching forms, and the woman closed the door behind her. A tall, gaunt, yellow-skinned man, his head perfectly bald and the lower part of his face covered with a heavy white beard and moustache, faced them. His clothing was half Western, half Oriental. A pair of thin, creased, grey tweed trousers met, or almost met, a pair of Turkish slippers, showing an inch of bare, lean ankle in between. His body was covered with a dirty yellow robe of fine woollen stuff, whose ragged fringe reached to his knees, and a faded red scarf was folded twice round his neck, one end hanging down his breast and the other down his back. 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." He spoke the words as a Pharaoh might have spoken them to a slave, and as though the bare, low-ceiled, shabby room, with its tawdry Oriental curtains and ornaments, had been an audience-chamber in the palace of Pepi in old Memphis, for this was he who had once been Anemen-Ha, High Priest of Ptah, in the days when Nitocris was Queen of the Two Kingdoms. "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."