And to prove it, Pierre assaulted that grillwork with his massive ax, smiting fiercely, bending and deforming the sturdy bars. I crawled through, followed him back to the Adytum of Darkness.

“Take the girl,” he commanded, as, true to his nature, and never forgetting his mission, he seized the mummy case, the one designed for a woman, and led the way to the exit.

As I leaped to the altar railing, lifted the still unconscious girl from the black hands, and wrapped her in my cape, I noted that the other mummy case was empty, and that its cover had been kicked aside.

One or two devil-worshipers stirred and twitched. Others groaned. Striding over that miniature battlefield, I followed in Pierre’s trace. And we made good time, Pierre and I, for the devil, though down for the count of ten, still lurked in that awful vault.

No one accosted us as Pierre led the way across the park to his car. What a pair we were: a vermilion-robed figure embracing a mummy case, and I, likewise robed, bearing in my arms a girl whose hair streamed to the ground, whose limbs gleamed brightly in the moonlight.

Well, the madman’s jubilee ended in Pierre’s apartment.

Lili, quite calm and magnificent in Pierre’s silken lounge robe, sipped a bit of cognac and took the entire affair as a matter of course, though she did have certain regrets.

“Those lovely shoes! Monsieur Landon, perhaps you would return for them?” she mocked.

And then, to Pierre, “Do tell me what it all was about.”

“Chère petite, it is a very long story. The stolen mummy would not interest you, directly; but my search for Madame the Princess and—what you call in English, her wooden negligee, n’est-ce-pas—? her sycamore case is what made me cross your trail. Voyez!”

Pierre showed us a photograph.

“This, Mademoiselle, does it not resemble you?”

“Quelle bêtise!” flared Lili. “What a notion!”

And then she admitted the resemblance, acknowledged, that that face of gilded sycamore, carved 3,700 years ago, might pass as an Egyptian-esque version of her own loveliness.

“So? It does resemble, yes? And the painting in the château, that of the mistress he adored twenty years ago, that could be your portrait of today, were not the lady’s costume a shade out of date. Behold the succession of resemblances, partly real, partly fancied. That I noted, immediately. And moreover, I saw, as did you, mon ami, that book bound in human hide; but unlike you, I read therefrom, many strange things. Then those drums whose heads were of human hide, and the arms, and all the other trophies of death … death … death which has haunted Monsieur the Marquis, turned his brilliant mind, and made him do this madness which we witnessed.