“How do you mean?” 

 “Master Silvio will do the attacking; the other one will do the suffering.” 

 “Suffering?”  There was a note of pain in her voice. The Doctor smiled more broadly: 

 “Oh, please make your mind easy as to that. The other won’t suffer as we understand it; except perhaps in his structure and outfit.” 

 “What on earth do you mean?” 

 “Simply this, my dear young lady, that the antagonist will be a mummy cat like this one. There are, I take it, plenty of them to be had in Museum Street. I shall get one and place it here instead of that one—you won’t think that a temporary exchange will violate your Father’s instructions, I hope. We shall then find out, to begin with, whether Silvio objects to all mummy cats, or only to this one in particular.” 

 “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully.  “Father’s instructions seem very uncompromising.”  Then after a pause she went on:  “But of course under the circumstances anything that is to be ultimately for his good must be done. I suppose there can’t be anything very particular about the mummy of a cat.” 

 Doctor Winchester said nothing. He sat rigid, with so grave a look on his face that his extra gravity passed on to me; and in its enlightening perturbation I began to realise more than I had yet done the strangeness of the case in which I was now so deeply concerned. When once this thought had begun there was no end to it. Indeed it grew, and blossomed, and reproduced itself in a thousand different ways. The room and all in it gave grounds for strange thoughts. There were so many ancient relics that unconsciously one was taken back to strange lands and strange times. There were so many mummies or mummy objects, round which there seemed to cling for ever the penetrating odours of bitumen, and spices and gums—“Nard and Circassia’s balmy smells”—that one was unable to forget the past. Of course, there was but little light in the room, and that carefully shaded; so that there was no glare anywhere. None of that direct light which can manifest itself as a power or an entity, and so make for companionship. The room was a large one, and lofty in proportion to its size. In its vastness was place for a multitude of things not often found in a bedchamber. In far corners of the room were shadows of uncanny shape. More than once as I thought, the 

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