Already the shadows were beginning to invade the painter's spacious studio; lurking in the folds of Flemish tapestry and Oriental stuffs, and filling distant corners where the glint of steel and copper arms and arabesques suggested the twinkling eyes of impish and unearthly listeners. If there is a time for everything, the early twilight is the season for story-telling, and the painter felt far less reluctance than he feigned when he resigned himself to listen. Throwing himself upon a divan and clasping his hands about an elevated knee, he said, "Begin your yarn, old fellow, I'm all attention."
Morewood took off his hat, bestrode a chair, and rested both elbows on its back.
"Dunbarton," he remarked, by way of introduction, "I don't suppose you have ever so much as heard of the college of Amen Ra?"
"Never in my life!" the other admitted frankly. "Where under the sun may be the college of Amen Ra?"
"No longer anywhere beneath the sun," Morewood replied, "but it used to be in Thebes about sixteen hundred years before Christ, as nearly as I can remember."
"Quite near enough," Dunbarton assented amiably. "We will not let a century or so retard a narrative which is to comprehend three thousand years."
"Don't jump too quickly at conclusions!" protested Morewood. "The story as I know it goes no farther back than the early sixties, when a party of five friends from Philadelphia——"
"Quakers?" inquired the painter.
"I don't know!" replied the other, not without a touch of irritation. "Five acquaintances, men of cultivation and means, who in the course of travel ascended the Nile as far as the first cataract. At Luxor they rested for a week, with a view to visiting the site of the great city of Thebes, and especially its marvelous and mystic temple of Amen Ra, unequaled upon earth for the sublimity of its ruined magnificence——"
"For further particulars, see Baedeker!" Dunbarton muttered.