leave her lover's couch, and had just loosed her hair to brush it again
and fasten the thick, fair braids around her head, when, two hours after
midnight, some one knocked loudly on the window shutters. Berenike was
in the act of removing the poultice, so Barine herself went into the
atrium to wake the doorkeeper.

But the old man was not asleep, and had anticipated her. She recognized,
with a low cry of terror, the first person who entered the lighted
vestibule--Alexas. Iras followed, her head closely muffled, for the
storm was still howling through the streets. Last of all a lantern-
bearer crossed the threshold.

The Syrian saluted the startled young beauty with a formal bow, but Iras,
without a greeting or even a single word of preparation, delivered the
Queen's command, and then read aloud, by the light of the lantern, what
Cleopatra had scrawled upon the wax tablet.

When Barine, pallid and scarcely able to control her emotion, requested
the messengers who had arrived at so late an hour to enter, in order to
give her time to prepare for the night drive and take leave of her
mother, Iras vouchsafed no reply, but, as if she had the right to rule
the house, merely ordered the doorkeeper to bring his mistress's cloak
without delay.

While the old man, with trembling knees, moved away, Iras asked if the
wounded Dion was in the dwelling; and Barine, her self-control restored
by the question, answered, with repellent pride, that the Queen's orders
did not command her to submit to an examination in her own house.

Iras shrugged her shoulders and said, sneeringly, to Alexas: