to announce to the four quarters of the heavens that a new sovereign had
mounted the throne of his fathers, and amid prayer and sacrifice a golden
sickle would be presented to him with which, according to ancient custom,
he would cut an ear of corn.

Betrayed by her brother, abandoned by her husband, parted from her
children, scorned by the man she had loved, dethroned and powerless,
too weak and too utterly crushed to dream of revenge--she spent two
interminably long hours in the keenest anguish of mind, shut up in her
prison which was overloaded with splendor and with gifts. If poison had
been within her reach, in that hour she would unhesitatingly have put an
end to her ruined life. Now she walked restlessly up and down, asking
herself what her fate would be, and now she flung herself on the couch
and gave herself up to dull despair.

There lay the lyre she had given to her brother; her eye fell on the
relievo of the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, and on the figure of a
woman who was offering a jewel to the bride. The bearer of the gift was
the goddess of love, and the ornament she gave--so ran the legend--
brought misfortune on those who inherited it. All the darkest hours of
her life revived in her memory, and the blackest of them all had come
upon her as the outcome of Aphrodite's gifts. She thought with a shudder
of the murdered Roman, and remembered the moment when Eulaeus had told
her that her Bithynian lover had been killed by wild beasts. She rushed
from one door to another--the victim of the avenging Eumenides--shrieked
from the window for rescue and help, and in that one hour lived through a
whole year of agonies and terrors.

At last--at last, the door of the room was opened, and Euergetes came
towards her, clad in the purple, with the crown of the two countries on