fruitless. The attendants of Edmond, whom he had left about the encampment at some little distance from the scene of his strange interview with the Kabyl, had noticed, neither the approach, nor the departure, of that mysterious visitant. On the morrow careful inquiries were instituted by order of VOL. II. B the Count throughout the surrounding villages. Without result, however. Far and wide, for many weeks past, no trace had been seen, no news had been heard, of any Kabyl troop. Those formidable marauders had been probably kept at a respectful distance by the numerous and well-armed escort of Count R. His interview with the Arab appeared more and more mysterious the more he considered it. No third person had been present on the spot, or even within sight of the speakers. The monuments and the dead were witnesses that could not be called into court. To increase his perplexity, Nature herself seemed to have entered into conspiracy with Circumstance, by refusing all testimony to the fact. The fine, smooth sand which overlies those ruins showed nowhere, either on the spot where the Kabyl had been standing, or along those places over which he must have passed when he disappeared into the temple of Ammon Chnouphis, the trace of any footsteps which could reasonably be attributed to him. Had the night wind, itself a phantom, jealous of any other spectral presence on its own domain, been careful to cancel before dawn all record of that apparition? Anyhow, no proof of the supposed interview could be educed from the Count's knowledge of the story of Amasis. The images on the papyrus were sufficiently unusual to have stimulated his imagination, and sufficiently suggestive of such a story to have enabled him to construct it unconsciously from the supple mentary materials of his own fancy. There rested the interpretation of the ring. But what proved that interpretation to be the right one? Those characters, even according to the hypothesis of which he could not feel quite sure that he was not the unconscious author, must have been enigmatical to the science of the Egyptians themselves. Nay, even the amethyst was a stone not common, (perhaps unknown), to that people. Everything in the character of the story seemed to indicate a theology anterior even to that of Egypt. But how, then, did the ring come into the Count's hands? Had he himself drawn it from the finger of the mummy ? If so, why had he no recollection of that act ? Was it possible that, in the act of possessing himself of the ring, the conscious ness of the action which had a real existence had been, as it were, submerged and obliterated in the superimposed consciousness of something which had only an ideal exist ence? Whichever way he turned it, the mystery remained. Finally he accustomed himself to look back at it through the chiar' oscuro of doubt. And, thus viewed, amidst many conflicting and equally unsatisfactory conjectures, the supposition that the whole occurrence had been a sort of waking dream (the effects of watching and the distemperature of an overlaboured brain) although not entirely, nor permanently, accepted by the Count (for what man in possession of his senses will willingly reject their evidence ?), yet, on the whole, assumed the most prominent, and the |