attracted men as ripe dates lure birds, it will be--I know--like rubbing
salt into her fresh wounds. Alas! and the one sorrow will not be all.
Antony, her husband, also found the way to Barine. He sought her more
than once. You cannot know it as I do; but Charmian will tell you how
sensitive she has become since the flower of her youthful charms--you
don't perceive it--is losing one leaf after another. Jealousy will
torture her, and--I know her well--perhaps no one will ever render the
siren a greater service than I did when I compelled her to leave the
city."

The eyes of Archibius's clever niece had glittered with such hostile
feeling as she spoke that he thought with just anxiety of his dead
friend's daughter. What did not yet threaten Barine as serious danger
Iras had the power to transform into grave peril.

Dion had begged him to maintain strict secrecy; but even had he been
permitted to speak, he would not have done so now. From his knowledge of
Iras's character she might be expected, if she learned that some one had
come between her and the friend of her youth, to shrink from no means of
spoiling her game. He remembered the noble Macedonian maiden whom the
Queen had begun to favour, and who was hunted to death by Iras's hostile
intrigues. Few were more clever, and--if she once loved--more loyal and
devoted, more yielding, pliant, and in happy hours more bewitching, yet
even in childhood she had preferred a winding path to a straight one.
It seemed as if her shrewdness scorned to attain the end desired by the
simple method lying close at hand. How willingly his mother and his
younger sister Charmian had cared for the slaves and nursed them when
they were ill; nay, Charmian had gained in her Nubian maid Aniukis a
friend who would have gone to death for her sake! Cleopatra, too, when a
child, had found sincere delight in taking a bouquet to his parents' sick