"It was Margot!
"The girl glanced up at me, a look that set my heart throbbing. It was my first real sight of her since I had seen her that afternoon with Ombos. I had thought her pretty then, but there is a distinct gap between a pretty woman and a lovely woman, and she was as beautiful as a Greek marble. Indeed, but for the carmine of her lips, and long dark eyelashes, she might have been chiselled out of pellucid stone, for her skin was dead white. She was—or had been—beautifully and expensively dressed, and there was breeding and refinement in every line of her face.
"'Don't you know me?' I said.
"The girl looked at me intently.
"'I know you, of course,' she said.
"I won't waste time in trying to tell you what my thoughts and sensations were. Rather I will tell you instead, what I did.
"It was some minutes later, and already we had started to walk slowly back in the direction of the Rue Bar-le-Duc.
"'And now you want to know—' she said.
"'Yes—that's it—what's become of Ombos ... and the bronze statue?'
"Margot looked up at me, and a strange melancholy transformed her face.... She was at a loss for words.... 'Poor Ombos—oh, poor, cranky Ombos,' she muttered. 'One morning I found him dead in his room, with all his wonderful, brown, powdery-looking books. He was leaning on a table over an old volume that he was fond of.... And then the doctors came. He had died, they afterwards said, of failure of the heart's action.'