the terrible task he had undertaken. For a year past, no meat had been
tasted in his house.

The physician Nebsecht, himself eating nothing but a piece of bread,
looked on at the feasters. They tore the meat from the bones, and the
soldier, especially, devoured the costly and unwonted meal like some
ravenous animal. He could be heard chewing like a horse in the manger,
and a feeling of disgust filled the physician's soul.

"Sensual beings," he murmured to himself, "animals with consciousness!
And yet human beings. Strange! They languish bound in the fetters of
the world of sense, and yet how much more ardently they desire that which
transcends sense than we--how much more real it is to them than to us!"

"Will you have some meat?" cried the soldier, who had remarked that
Nebsecht's lips moved, and tearing a piece of meat from the bone of the
joint he was devouring, he held it out to the physician. Nebsecht shrank
back; the greedy look, the glistening teeth, the dark, rough features of
the man terrified him. And he thought of the white and fragile form of
the sick girl lying within on the mat, and a question escaped his lips.

"Is the maiden, is Uarda, your own child?" he said.

The soldier struck himself on the breast. "So sure as the king Rameses
is the son of Seti," he answered. The men had finished their meal, and
the flat cakes of bread which the wife of the paraschites gave them, and
on which they had wiped their hands from the fat, were consumed, when the
soldier, in whose slow brain the physician's question still lingered,
said, sighing deeply: