He looked at her with the smile of a frightened child looking at a grown-up person.
"Well, tell me, don't be afraid, I understand!"
"I sometimes fancy that he is not quite human...."
"Not quite human?" she repeated in surprise: there was something knowing, something clairvoyant in his face and voice.
"There are dolls like that," he went on, with the same smile. "If you pull a string, they dance. That's what he is like, he does not do anything of himself, but somebody does it for him. Don't you understand? Perhaps you will when you see him."
"Have you seen much of him?"
"Yes. We were pupils of the Heliopolis priests together—he, Merira, who is now the high priest of Aton, and myself. I was thirteen then and the prince fourteen. He was very handsome, and gentle, very gentle, like the god whose name is Quiet Heart."
"Osiris?"
"Yes. I loved him as my own soul. He often went to the desert to pray or, perhaps, simply to be alone. One day he went—and disappeared. We looked and looked for him, and thought he was lost altogether. At last he was found among the shepherds in the fields of Rostia where the Pyramids are and the Sphinx—the ancient god of the sun, Aton. He was lying on the sand like one dead, probably after an epileptic fit—it was then he began having fits. And when they brought him to the town I did not know him; it was he, and not he, his double, a changeling—as I have said just now, he was not quite human. Perhaps it was there in the desert that he entered into him...."
"Whom do you mean?"