should you care to undertake its publication, you can do what you
like with it, but if there is a loss I will leave instructions with my
lawyers, Messrs. Geoffrey and Jordan, to meet it. We entrust the sherd,
the scarab, and the parchments to your keeping, till such time as we
demand them back again. --L. H. H."

[*] This name is varied throughout in accordance with the
writer's request.--Editor.

This letter, as may be imagined, astonished me considerably, but when I
came to look at the MS., which the pressure of other work prevented me
from doing for a fortnight, I was still more astonished, as I think the
reader will be also, and at once made up my mind to press on with the
matter. I wrote to this effect to Mr. Holly, but a week afterwards
received a letter from that gentleman's lawyers, returning my own, with
the information that their client and Mr. Leo Vincey had already left
this country for Thibet, and they did not at present know their address.

Well, that is all I have to say. Of the history itself the reader must
judge. I give it him, with the exception of a very few alterations,
made with the object of concealing the identity of the actors from the
general public, exactly as it came to me. Personally I have made up my
mind to refrain from comments. At first I was inclined to believe that
this history of a woman on whom, clothed in the majesty of her almost
endless years, the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing
of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the
meaning. Then I thought that it might be a bold attempt to portray the
possible results of practical immortality, informing the substance of
a mortal who yet drew her strength from Earth, and in whose human bosom
passions yet rose and fell and beat as in the undying world around her