ned fear and aversion. But he soon began to
speak of the letter whose bearer Ephraim had been and, after reading it
aloud and explaining it, the youth realized with a slight shudder that he
had become an accomplice in the most criminal of all plots, and for a
moment the longing stole over him to betray the traitors and deliver them
into the hand of the mighty sovereign whose destruction they were
plotting. But he repelled the thought and merely sunned himself in the
pleasurable consciousness--the first during this cruel hour-of holding
Kasana and her royal lover in his hand as one holds a beetle by a string.
This had a favorable effect on him and restored the confidence and
courage he had lost. The baser the things he continued to hear, the more
clearly he learned to appreciate the value of the goodness and truth
which he had lost. His uncle's words, too, came back to his memory.

"Give no man, from the loftiest to the lowliest, a right to regard you
save with respect, and you can hold your head as high as the proudest
warrior who ever wore purple robe and golden armor."

On the couch in Kasana's house, while shaking with fever, he had
constantly repeated this sentence; but in the misery of captivity, and on
his flight it had again vanished from his memory. In the courtier's tent
when, after he had bathed and perfumed himself, the old slave held a
mirror before him, he had given it a passing thought; but now it mastered
his whole soul. And strange to say, the worthless traitor within wore a
purple coat and golden mail, and looked like a military hero, but he
could not hold his head erect, for the work he sought to accomplish could
only succeed in the secrecy that shuns the light, and was like the labor
of the hideous mole which undermines the ground in the darkness.

His tool was the repulsive cloven-footed trio, falsehood, fraud, and
faithlessness, and she whom he had chosen for his help-mate was the
woman--it shamed him to his inmost soul-for whom he had been in the act
of sacrificing all that was honorable, precious, and dear to him.

The worst infamies which he had been taught to shun were the rounds of
the ladder on which this evil man intended to mount.

The roll the youth had brought to the camp contained two letters. The
first was from the conspirators in Tanis, the second from Siptah's
mother.

The former desired his speedy return and told him that the Syrian Aarsu,
the commander of the foreign mercenaries