After that meal was over, Mrs. Carr asked her guest which he would like to see, her collection of beetles or of mummies.

“Thank you, Mrs. Carr, I have had enough of beetles for one day, so I vote for the mummies.”

“Very well.  Will you come, Agatha?”

“Now, Mildred, you know very well that I won’t come.  Just think, Mr. Heigham:  I only saw the nasty things once, and then they gave me the creeps every night for a fortnight.  As though those horrid Egyptian ‘fellahs’ weren’t ugly enough when they were alive without going and making great skin and bone dolls of them—­pah!”

“Agatha persists in believing that my mummies are the bodies of people like she saw in Egypt last year.”

“And so they are, Mildred.  That last one you got is just like the boy who used to drive my donkey at Cairo—­the one that died, you know—­I believe they just stuffed him, and said that he was an ancient king.  Ancient king, indeed!” And Miss Terry departed, in search for more beetles.

“Now, Mr. Heigham, you must follow me.  The museum is not in the house.  Wait, I will get a hat.”

In a minute she returned, and led the way across a strip of garden to a detached building, with a broad verandah, facing the sea.  Scarcely ten feet from this verandah, and on the edge of the sheer precipice, was built a low wall, leaning over which Arthur could hear the wavelets lapping against the hollow rock two hundred feet beneath him.  Here they stopped for a moment to look at the vast expanse of ocean, glittering in the sunlight like a sea of molten sapphires and heaving as gently as an infant’s bosom.

“It is very lovely; the sea moves just enough to show that it is only asleep.”

“Yes; but I like it best when it is awake, when it blows a hurricane—­ it is magnificent.  The whole cliff shakes with the shock of the waves, and sometimes the spray drives over in sheets.  That is when I like to sit here; it exhilarates me, and makes me feel as though I belonged to the storm, and was strong with its strength.  Come, let us go in.”

The entrance to the verandah was from the end that faced the house, and to gain it they passed under the boughs of a large magnolia-tree.  Going through glass doors that opened outwards into the verandah, Mrs. Carr entered a room luxuriously furnished as a boudoir.  This had apparently no other exit, and Arthur was beginning to wonder where the museum could be, when she took a tiny bramah key from her watch-chain, and with it opened a door that was papered and painted to match the wall exactly.  He followed her, and found himself in a stone passage, dimly lighted from above, and sloping downwards, that led to a doorway graven in the rock, on the model of those to be seen at the entrance of Egyptian temples.

“Now, Mr. Heigham,” she said, flinging open another door, and stepping forward, “you are about the enter ‘The Hall of the Dead.’”