More difficultly ambiguous, certainly, was the position in which Lord Leighton found himself with Nitocris, but here also her tact and perfect candour helped his own innate chivalry to accomplish all that was desirable with the slightest possible friction. She began by telling him, as she had told Brenda, of the mysterious stealing of the Mummy, and made a sort of apology for her father having deputed the telling of it to her--of course, in perfect innocence of the real reason for his doing so. He deplored with her the loss of what they both believed to be a priceless relic of the Golden Age of Egypt, but he passed it over lightly, chiefly for the reason that there was something in his mind just now that was much more serious than even the loss of the mummy of her long-dead namesake. There had been a little silence between them after he had made his condolences, and then he said, with a hesitation which told quite plainly what was coming: "Miss Marmion, I have a rather awkward confession to make to you--I have got to tell you, in fact, I think it is my duty to--well, honestly I really don't quite know how to put it properly, but--but--er, something has happened to me to-day that is a good deal more important to me, at least, than the disappearance of half a dozen royal mummies." "Indeed?" said Nitocris, with a demurely perfect assumption of ignorance. "A good many things seem somehow to have happened to-day. It is something connected with that wonderful Adept's marvels, perhaps? They have certainly astonished most of us, I think." "No," he replied, still a trifle hesitatingly, "it is nothing connected with him or his miracles, as far as I know, except that there was certainly something decidedly queer about the man and the impression he made upon one. Of course I have seen something like the same thing in Egypt and the Farther East; but he seemed quite what I might call uncanny. Still, that's not the point, although possibly it may have had something to do with it." He hesitated again. She looked at him with a sideway glance, and said, almost in a whisper: "Yes?" The moonlight was bright enough for him to see the notes of interrogation in her eyes, and he took the plunge. "Miss Marmion, I once told you that I loved you and wanted you for my wife, and--and the real fact is that it--I mean I know now that it wasn't true--and so I thought I ought to tell you. You know, of course, that the Professor----" "My dear Lord Leighton," she answered, with an air of quite superior wisdom, "my learned father is a very clever man in his own subjects: but I think I know a great deal more about this particular one than he does. You are quite right. You did not love me. You liked me very much, I have no doubt----" "Yes, and so I do still, and always shall do, but----"