her child, the treasure confided to her care, whom she had sworn to
cherish?

"No, and again no," she said resolutely. "She was born for happiness, and
I for endurance, and if I dare beseech thee to grant me one thing more, O
thou infinite Divinity! it is that Thou wouldst cut out from my soul this
love which is eating into my heart as though it were rotten wood, and
keep me far from envy and jealousy when I see her happy in his arms. It
is hard--very hard to drive one's own heart out into the desert in order
that spring may blossom in that of another: but it is well so--and my
mother would commend me and my father would say I had acted after his own
heart, and in obedience to the teaching of the great men on these
pedestals. Be still, be still my aching heart--there--that is right!"

Thus reflecting she went past the busts of Zeno and Chrysippus, glancing
at their features distinct in the moonlight: and her eyes falling on the
smooth slabs of stone with which the open space was paved, her own shadow
caught her attention, black and sharply defined, and exactly resembling
that of some man travelling from one town to another in his cloak and
broad-brimmed hat.

"Just like a man!" she muttered to herself; and as, at the same moment,
she saw a figure resembling her own, and, like herself, wearing a hat,
appear near the entrance to the tombs, and fancied she recognized it as
Publius, a thought, a scheme, flashed through her excited brain, which at
first appalled her, but in the next instant filled her with the ecstasy
which an eagle may feel when he spreads his mighty wings and soars above
the dust of the earth into the pure and infinite ether. Her heart beat
high, she breathed deeply and slowly, but she advanced to meet the Roman,
drawn up to her full height like a queen, who goes forward to receive
some equal sovereign; her hat, which she had taken off, in her left hand,
and the Smith's key in her right-straight on towards the door of the
Apis-tombs.

CHAPTER XXI.

The man whom Klea had seen was in fact none other than Publius. He was
now at the end of a busy day, for after he had assured himself that Irene
had been received by the sculptor and his wife, and welcomed as if she
were their own child, he had returned to his tent to write once more a
dispatch to Rome. But this he could not accomplish, for his friend Lysias
paced restlessly up and down by him as he sat, and as often as he put the
reed to the papyru