What this was every child in Egypt knew, for "May I be sent to the
mines!" was one of the most terrible oaths of the common people, and no
prisoner's lot was half so hard as that of the convicted state-criminals.

A series of the most terrible humiliations and tortures awaited them.
The vigor of the robust was broken by unmitigated toil; the exhausted
were forced to execute tasks so far beyond their strength that they soon
found the eternal rest for which their tortured souls longed. To be sent
to the mines meant to be doomed to a slow, torturing death; yet life is
so dear to men that it was considered a milder punishment to be dragged
to forced labor in the mines than to be delivered up to the executioner.

Joshua's encouraging words had little effect upon Ephraim; but when, a
few minutes later, a chariot shaded by an umbrella, passed the prisoners,
a chariot in which a slender woman of aristocratic bearing stood beside a
matron behind the driver, he turned with a hasty movement and gazed after
the equipage with sparkling eyes till it vanished in the dust of the
road.

The younger woman had been closely veiled, but Ephraim thought he
recognized her for whose sake he had gone to his ruin, and whose lightest
sign he would still have obeyed.

And he was right; the lady in the chariot was Kasana, the daughter of
Hornecht, captain of the archers, and the matron was her nurse.

At a little temple by the road-side, where, in the midst of a grove of
Nile acacias, a well was maintained for travellers, she bade the matron
wait for her and, springing lightly from the chariot which had left the