This was better than he had dared hope. Yet it was what he had
half-believed; she was quite mad. He felt relieved at this final proof
of it. After all, it would have hurt him to send this woman to "the
chair"; but there would be no condemned cell for her; only the madhouse.
It might be harder for her; but it made it easier for him. He nodded a
grave encouragement for her to continue.
"This is my mummy," she went on, nodding toward the gilded case, "the
shell from which my soul fled three thousand years ago. Since then it
has been upon its wanderings, living in birds and beasts, that the will
of Osiris might be done."
Again she paused, pleased, apparently, with the respectful interest
which Simpkins showed. And, indeed, he was interested; for his reading
on early Egyptian beliefs enabled him to follow the current of her
madness and to trace it back to its sources. So he nodded again, and she
continued:
"Through all these weary centuries, Amosis, my husband, has been with
me, first as king--ah! those days in hundred-gated Thebes--and when at
last my soul lodged in this body he found me out again. As boy and girl
we loved, as man and woman we were married. And the days that followed
were as happy as those old days when we ruled an empire. Not that we
remembered then. The memory of it all but just came back to me two
months ago.
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