"Then please let me see it," she replied, assenting with an inclination of her head. "If that is so it must be, as you say, well worth seeing."
He went to his room and came back with a large square morocco case in his hand. He gave it to her, and said:
"Do me the favour to open it, and tell me what you think of it."
She touched the spring and the cover flew up. She half-expected what she saw. There, lying in a nest of soft black velvet, encircled by a triple halo of whitely gleaming diamonds, was the Horus Stone. In an instant she travelled back through fifty centuries to the scene of the death-bridal of her other self, Nitocris the Queen, in the banqueting-hall of the Palace of Pepi. Then it had lain gleaming on her breast, and now she saw it again with the eyes of flesh, after nearly five thousand years. Now, too, she grasped in all the fullness of its evil meaning the reason why Oscarovitch had brought it to her in such an hour as this. With utter contempt in her soul and a smile on her lips, she leaned back in her chair and said in a voice which had a note of ecstasy in it:
"Oh, Prince, how lovely! What a glorious gem! The diamonds are, of course, splendid, but they are only a setting for the emerald. What a magnificent stone! Rich as you are, you are very fortunate to be the possessor of such a treasure—for treasure it surely must be."
"It is, as you say, a magnificent stone," he replied, looking steadily into her questioning eyes. "But if what Amena told me was true, it is something more than a unique gem. There is an inscription on it, some characters carved in the stone which are, as he said, the history of it, but to me they are as unintelligible as the Assyrian cuneiform would be. Possibly you may know something of them. If you do, here is a lens that will help your sight."
She took the glass from him and bent down over the gem. She read the sacred symbol of the Trinity as she had read it and known it ages before. But while she was gazing at it, she also read the intent of the man who had given it into her hands. She put the lens aside, and, laying her palms on her temples, she looked deep down into the luminous depths of the great emerald in a silence which Oscarovitch interpreted into such meaning as he was able to make for himself.
Minute after minute passed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the Stone. Her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of Phidias: pure, cold, and true. A feeling of something like awe crept over him as he watched her, and he found himself asking whether, after all, Phadrig's story might have been true. But, true or not, there was the fascination which, as Phadrig had told him, had lured Isaac Josephus to his self-inflicted doom. Her eyes were chained to the gem: her face was no longer that of a living woman dominated by her own will. After all his disbelief, there was an enchantment in the Stone, for here, even she, Nitocris, had succumbed to it.
He sat and waited for a few minutes longer. If there is magic in the Stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the Stone had, as Phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had gazed upon its fatal beauty.
Then he got up and, reaching over her shoulders, took up the diamond chain, glistening under the soft light of the starry dome of the saloon, shook it out into a flood of white radiance, lifted it above her head, and let it fall very gently round her neck. The Horus Stone, as though endowed with sentience, fell and rested where it had rested five thousand years before. As it touched her flesh Nitocris felt a tremor of indescribable emotion, not only of the body but of the soul, pass through her. She leaned back in her chair again, and whispered: