“No my uncle neither had nor expected children, as far as I know!”

“Thor did not see her,—­Gnulemah?”

“Gnulemah?—­how should he have seen her?” exclaimed Balder, in surprise.

“Then her mystery remains!” said Manetho, looking up.

He had perhaps doubted whether any suspicion of who Gnulemah really was had found its way to the young man’s mind.  The latter’s reception of his question reassured him.  There could be no risk in catering to his aroused curiosity.  The account Manetho now gave was true, though falsehood lurked in the pauses.

“That day Thor came, I left the house early in the morning.  It was night when I returned; and Thor was gone.  The house was dark, and at first there was no sound.  But presently I heard the voice of a child, murmuring and babbling baby words.  I passed through the outer hall and the conservatory, and came to where we now are.  The lamp was burning as it has burned ever since.

“I saw him lying on the altar steps,—­lying so!” Marrying act to word, the Egyptian slid down and lay prostrate at the altar’s foot.  “He was dead and cold!” he added; and gave way to a shuddering outburst of grief.

Balder’s nerves were a little staggered at this tale with its heightening of dramatic action and morbid circumstance; and he was silent until the actor (if such he were) was in some degree repossessed of himself.  Then he asked,—­

“What of the child?”

“I have named her Gnulemah.  She played about the dead body, bright and careless as the flame of the lamp.  Whence she came she could not tell, nor had I seen her before that day.  It seemed that, at the moment my master’s life burned out, hers flamed up; and since that day it has lighted and warmed my solitude.”

“And Doctor Glyphic—­”

“I embalmed him!” cried Manetho, clasping his hands in grotesque enthusiasm.  “It was my privilege and my consolation to render his body immortal.  In my grief I rejoiced at the opportunity of manifesting my devotion.  Not the proudest of the Pharaohs was more sumptuously preserved than he!  In that labor of love there was no cunning secret of the art that I did not employ.  Night and day I worked alone; and while he lay in the long nitre bath, I watched or slept beside him.  Then I enwound him thousand-fold in finest linen smeared with fragrant gum, and hid his beloved form in the coffin he had chosen long before.”

“Did my uncle choose this form of burial?”

“He lived in hopes of it!  It was his wish that his body might be disposed as became his name, and the passion that had ruled his life.  Me only did he deem worthy of the task, and equal to it.  Had I died before him, his fairest hope would have been blighted, his life a failure!”

“A dead failure, truly!” muttered Balder, impelled by the very grewsomeness of the subject to jest about it.  “Was his loftiest aspiration to mummy and be mummied?—­But yours was a dangerous office to fulfil, Cousin Manetho.  Had the death got abroad, you might have been suspected of foul play!”