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Joshua — Volume 4 by Georg Ebers
page 7 of 72 (09%)

Was it she?

Should he venture to speak to her? Yes, it must be done.

Panting for breath and clenching his hands, he summoned up his courage as
if he were about to steal unbidden into the most sacred sanctuary of a
temple. Then he pushed the curtain aside, and the woman whom he had just
noticed greeted him with a low cry.

But he speedily regained his composure, for a ray of light had fallen on
her face, revealing that the person who stood before him was not Kasana,
but her nurse, who had accompanied her to the prisoners and then to the
camp. She, too, recognized him and stared at him as though he had risen
from the grave.

They were old acquaintances; for when he was first brought to the
archer's house she had prepared his bath and moistened his wound with
balsam, and during his second stay beneath the same roof, she had joined
her mistress in nursing him. They had chatted away many an hour
together, and he knew that she was kindly disposed toward him; for when
midway between waking and sleeping, in his burning fever, her hand had
stroked him with maternal tenderness, and afterwards she had never
wearied of questioning him about his people and at last had acknowledged
that she was descended from the Syrians, who were allied to the Hebrews.
Nay, even his language was not wholly strange to her; for she had been a
woman of twenty when dragged to Egypt with other prisoners of Rameses the
Great. Ephraim, she was fond of saying, reminded her of her own son when
he was still younger.

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