ped from drowning,
threatened on all sides by fierce hatred, he stood firm, and remained
victor also in the open field, after the young King had placed himself
at the head of the Egyptians and collected an army.

"You know that the boy was drowned in the flight.

"In battle and mortal peril, amid blood and the clank of arms, Caesar
and Cleopatra spent half a year ere they were permitted to pluck the
fruit of their common labour. The dictator now made her Queen of Egypt,
and gave her, as co-regent, her youngest brother, a boy not half her own
age. To Arsinoe he granted the life she had forfeited, but sent her to
Italy.

"Peace followed the victory. Now, it is true, grave duties must have
summoned the statesman back to Rome, but he tarried three full months
longer.

"Whoever knows the life of the ambitious Julius, and is aware what this
delay might have cost him, may well strike his brow with his hand, and
ask, 'Is it true and possible that he used this precious time to take a
trip with the woman he loved up the Nile, to the island of Isis,
which is so dear to the Queen, to the extreme southern frontier of the
country?' Yet it was so, and I myself went in the second ship, and not
only saw them together, but more than once shared their banquets
and their conversation. It was giving and taking, forcing down and
elevating, a succession of discords, not unpleasant to hear, because
experience taught that they would finally terminate in the most
beautiful harmony. It was a festal day for all the senses."

"I imagine the whole Nile journey," interrupted Barine, "to be like
the fairy voyage, when the purple silk sails of Cleopatra's galley bore
Antony along the Cydnus."

"No, no," replied Archibius, "she first learned from Antony the art of
filling this earthly existence with fleeting pleasures. Caesar demanded
more. Her intellect offered him the highest enjoyment."

Here he hesitated.

"True, the skill with which, to please Antony, she daily offered him for
years fresh charms for every sense, was not a matter of accident."

"And this," cried Barine, "this was undertaken by the woman who had
recognized the chief good in peace of mind!"

"Ay," replied Archibius thoughtfully, "yet this was the inevitable
result. Pleasure had been the young girl's object in life. Ere passion
awoke in her soul, peace of mind was the chief good she knew. When the
hour arrived that this proved unattainable, the firmly rooted yearning
for h