so splendidly restored for me after your father's death, the noble
gardens, the fine horses in their stables, and all the male and female
slaves!"

Paaker laughed, but the laugh sounded so forced and scornful that it cut
Nefert to the heart, and she went on, as if begging for indulgence:

"It was said that you were angry with us; and now you will take my words
as if I had cared only for your wealth; but I said, I liked you. Do you
no longer remember how I cried with you over your tales of the bad boys
in the school; and over your father's severity? Then my uncle died;--
then you went to Asia."

And you," interrupted Paaker, hardly and drily, "you broke your
bethrothal vows, and became the wife of the charioteer Mena. I know it
all; of what use is talking?"

"Because it grieves me that you should be angry, and your good mother
avoid our house. If only you could know what it is when love seizes one,
and one can no longer even think alone, but only near, and with, and in
the very arms of another; when one's beating heart throbs in one's very
temples, and even in one's dreams one sees nothing--but one only."

"And do I not know it?" cried Paaker, placing himself close before her
with his arms crossed. "Do I not know it? and you it was who taught me
to know it. When I thought of you, not blood, but burning fire, coursed
in my veins, and now you have filled them with poison; and here in this
breast, in which your image dwelt, as lovely as that of Hathor in her
holy of holies, all is like that sea in Syria which is called the Dead
Sea, in which every thing that tries to live presently dies and