“He is her nephew right enough,” Mansfield corrected his wife, before proceeding to his own man’s form of elaboration; “no question about that, I believe.  He’s her favourite nephew, and she’s as rich as a pig.  He follows her out here every year, waiting for her empty shoes.  But they are an unsavoury couple.  I’ve met ’em in various parts, all over Egypt, but they always come back to Helouan in the end.  And the stories about them are simply legion.  You remember—­” he turned hesitatingly to his wife—­“some people, I heard,” he changed his sentence, “were made quite ill by her.”

“I’m sure Felix ought to know, yes,” his wife boldly took him up, “my niece, Fanny, had the most extraordinary experience.”  She turned to Henriot.  “Her room was next to Lady Statham in some hotel or other at Assouan or Edfu, and one night she woke and heard a kind of mysterious chanting or intoning next her.  Hotel doors are so dreadfully thin.  There was a funny smell too, like incense of something sickly, and a man’s voice kept chiming in.  It went on for hours, while she lay terrified in bed—­”

“Frightened, you say?” asked Henriot.

“Out of her skin, yes; she said it was so uncanny—­made her feel icy.  She wanted to ring the bell, but was afraid to leave her bed.  The room was full of—­of things, yet she could see nothing.  She felt them, you see.  And after a bit the sound of this sing-song voice so got on her nerves, it half dazed her—­a kind of enchantment—­she felt choked and suffocated.  And then—­” It was her turn to hesitate.

“Tell it all,” her husband said, quite gravely too.

“Well—­something came in.  At least, she describes it oddly, rather; she said it made the door bulge inwards from the next room, but not the door alone; the walls bulged or swayed as if a huge thing pressed against them from the other side.  And at the same moment her windows—­she had two big balconies, and the venetian shutters were fastened—­both her windows darkened—­though it was two in the morning and pitch dark outside.  She said it was all one thing—­trying to get in; just as water, you see, would rush in through every hole and opening it could find, and all at once.  And in spite of her terror—­that’s the odd part of it—­she says she felt a kind of splendour in her—­a sort of elation.”

“She saw nothing?”

“She says she doesn’t remember.  Her senses left her, I believe—­though she won’t admit it.”

“Fainted for a minute, probably,” said Mansfield.

“So there it is,” his wife concluded, after a silence.  “And that’s true.  It happened to my niece, didn’t it, John?”

Stories and legendary accounts of strange things that the presence of these two brought poured out then.  They were obviously somewhat mixed, one account borrowing picturesque details from another, and all in disproportion, as when people tell stories in a language they are little familiar with.  But, listening with avidity, yet also with uneasiness, somehow, Henriot put two and two together.  Truth stood behind them somewhere.  These two held traffic with the powers that ancient Egypt knew.