She looked at the lovely reflection in the long mirror behind her dressing-table, and said to herself in a low, whispering laugh:
"This for you, Oscar Oscarovitch that is, Menkau-Ra who was! Yes, you may dream your pleasant dreams to-night; you may take me to your lonely castle in Viborg Bay; you may make me marry you, as you think I shall—and here is my wedding gift—mine again after all these ages—blessed be for ever the Holy Trinity, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. May the Most High Gods help and protect me!"
She raised the Sacred Stone to her lips as she spoke, turned off the light, and lay down in her bed to dream dreams of forgotten ages.
CHAPTER XXV
THE PASSING OF PHADRIG
In all London, or, indeed, in any capital of Europe, there were no more angrily puzzled men than Nicol Hendry and his colleague and subordinates. He was perfectly certain now that Phadrig Amena held the key to the conspiracy which had resulted in the disappearance of Prince Zastrow. Oscarovitch had vanished. He had been traced to Copenhagen, and then absolutely lost sight of. Three agents, all picked experts, had been put on to watch Phadrig and the Pentanas, as they were known to him, and within a fortnight they had all died. One had fallen down crossing the north side of Trafalgar Square: the verdict had been heart failure. Another threw himself into the river from the Tower Bridge; and the third, a woman who was one of the most skilful spies in the service of the International, had made his acquaintance and had dinner with him at the "Monico," and was found dead the next morning with an empty morphia syringe in her hand and a swollen puncture in her left arm.
Thus four more or less valuable lives had been lost, and not a shred of tangible evidence obtained against the Egyptian. Convinced as he was that this man was as responsible for their deaths as he had been for that of Josephus, neither he nor his colleagues could find the slightest grounds for applying for a warrant for his arrest, and meanwhile things were going from bad to worse in Russia. The Romanoff dynasty was tottering to its fall. The responsible leaders of the Revolution, angry and bewildered by the loss of the man whom they had practically chosen to rule over them, were distributing thousands of copies of an unsigned manifesto which could not have come from any one but "the new Skobeleff." What was left of the army and the navy was rallying to the nameless standard of the still unknown saviour of Russia. Von Kessner and Captain Vollmar had apparently ceased to exist, and the Princess Hermia was living with her lady-in-waiting in the strictest retirement in Dresden.
"It seems to me that things are at an utter deadlock," said Nicol Hendry to the Chief of the German section, who had come over to London to confer with him. "Four of our best agents have died in a fortnight, and the others are getting shy. Really, we can't blame them. This is not like fighting the ordinary sort of anarchist or regicide, who, after all, does content himself with physical means. This infernal scoundrel, as I must confess I was warned to begin with, is quite independent of the rules of the game. He kills people by their own hands, not his, and, literally, there seems no way of catching him."
"There must be a way, my dear Hendry," replied the German, who was the very incarnation of mechanical officialism. "You look at these things as consequences, I regard them only as rather extraordinary coincidences. If this is anything like what you seem to think it, it is supernatural, and I don't believe in that."