He slightly shrugged his shoulders.

"What you may term the hocus-pocus side of the case," he replied,
"turns on matters Egyptian, doesn't it? Very well. Who else, that we
know about, is associated, or ever has been associated with Egypt?"

"But--the woman?"

"Ah!" said Gatton. "Now you are getting down to the depths. But
assuming that the extraordinary characteristics of this visitor of
yours can be explained in some way, by deliberate trickery, for
example, might she not be a woman whom Eric Coverly met in Egypt?"

I stared silently a while, and then:

"In short, a rival of Miss Merlin's?" I suggested.

"Precisely. The trick with the photograph was just of the kind one
would expect from a madly jealous woman. Everything planned with
supreme cunning, but the scene at which the hated rival enters the
scheme badly overdone."

"And you believe Coverly's silence to be due to the fact that he is
shielding some one?"

"Well, that or shielding himself. What else can it mean? A man
suspected of murder doesn't hesitate to establish an alibi unless he
is in a desperately tight corner. The exact position of your
strange-eyed acquaintance in the case is not apparent to me at the