felt abashed. To this day I remember that leather-seated chair. The arms
of it ended in ivory sphinxes and on its back of black wood in an oval
was inlaid the name of the great Rameses, to whom indeed it had once
belonged. Dishes were handed to us--only two of them and those quite
simple, for Seti was no great eater--by a young Nubian slave of a
very merry face, and with them wine more delicious than any I had ever
tasted.

We ate and drank and the Prince talked to me of my business as a scribe
and of the making of tales, which seemed to interest him very much.
Indeed one might have thought that he was a pupil in the schools and I
the teacher, so humbly and with such care did he weigh everything that I
said about my art. Of matters of state or of the dreadful scene of blood
through which we had just passed he spoke no word. At the end, however,
after a little pause during which he held up a cup of alabaster as thin
as an eggshell, studying the light playing through it on the rich red
wine within, he said to me:

"Friend Ana, we have passed a stirring hour together, the first perhaps
of many, or mayhap the last. Also we were born upon the same day
and therefore, unless the astrologers lie, as do other men--and
women--beneath the same star. Lastly, if I may say it, I like you well,
though I know not how you like me, and when you are in the room with me
I feel at ease, which is strange, for I know of no other with whom it is
so.

"Now by a chance only this morning I found in some old records which I
was studying, that the heir to the throne of Egypt a thousand years ago,
had, and therefore, as nothing ever changes in Egypt, still has, a right
to a private librarian for which the State, that is, the toilers of the