In this chapel the signet had been lost.

Kenkenes set his light on the floor and began his search.  The first time he searched the floor, he laid the lack of success to his excited work.  The second time, the perspiration began to trickle down his temples.  Thereafter he sought, lengthwise and crosswise, calling on the gods for aid, but there was no glint of the jewel.

At last, sick with despair, he sat down to collect himself.  Suddenly across the heavy silence there smote a sound.  In a place closer to the beating heart of the world, the movement might have escaped him.  Now, though it was but the rustle of sweeping robes, it seemed to sough like the wind among the clashing blades of palm-leaves.

For a moment Kenkenes sat, transfixed, and in that moment the sound came nearer.  He remembered the injunction of the old keeper.  Human or supernatural, the new-comer must not find him there.  He leaped behind the altar of Shaemus, extinguishing the light as he did so.  He flung the corner of his kamis over the reeking wick that the odor might not escape, but his fear in that direction was materially lessened when he saw that the stranger bore a fuming torch.

On one end of the short pole of the torch was a knot of flaming pitch, on the other was a bronze ring fitted with sprawling claws.  The stranger set the light on the floor and the device kept the torch upright.  He crossed the room and stood at the altar of Neferari Thermuthis.

By the deeply fringed and voluminous draperies, and by the venerable beard, rippling and streaked with gray, the young sculptor took the stranger to be an Israelite.  As Kenkenes looked upon him, he was minded of his father, the magnificent Mentu.  There was the bearing of the courtier, with the same wondrous stature, the same massive frame.  But the delicate features of the Egyptian, the long, slim fingers, the narrow foot, were absent.  In this man’s countenance there was majesty instead of grace; in his figure, might, instead of elegance.  The expression had need of only a little emphasis in either direction to become benign or terrible.  Kenkenes caught a single glance of the eyes under the gray shelter of the heavy brows.  Once, the young man had seen hanging from Meneptah’s neck the rarest jewel in the royal treasure.  The wise men had called it an opal.  It shot lights as beautiful and awful as the intensest flame.  And something in the eyes of this mighty man brought back to Kenkenes the memory of the fires of that wondrous gem.

The stranger stood in profound meditation, his splendid head gradually sinking until it rested on his breast.  The arms hung by the sides.  The attitude suggested a sorrow healed by the long years until it was no more a pain, but a memory so subduing that it depressed.  At last the great man sank to his knees, with a movement quite in keeping with his grandeur and his mood, and bowed his head on his arms.