There was no scar on his finger--no break in the ring.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his eyes, first at his hand, and then at the ring.

"Then it _is_ true!" He was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the dressing-table and whispered: "What a terrible power--and what an awful responsibility! Well, thank God, I am a fairly honest man!" As he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence which he had never experienced before.

His brain was not only perfectly clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts appeared to be turned backward instead of forward.

The things of his own life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him.

The facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of Egyptian history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities.