ke
nature--"

"Cease, cease!" interrupted Cleopatra. "I know what I know. No mortal
can escape the great eternal laws of Nature. As surely as birth
commences life, everything that exists moves onward to destruction and
decay."

"Yet the gods," Iras persisted, "give to their works different degrees
of existence. The waterlily blooms but a single day, yet how full of
vigour is the sycamore in the garden of the Paneum, which has flourished
a thousand years! Not a petal in the blossoms of your youth has faded,
and is it conceivable that there is even the slightest diminution in the
love of him who cast away all that man holds dearest because he could
not endure to part, even for days or weeks, from the woman whom he
worshipped?"

"Would that he had done so!" cried Cleopatra mournfully. "But are you
so sure that it was love which made him follow me? I am of a different
opinion. True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of
man. I learned this when Caesar was prisoned by a greatly superior force
within this very palace, his ships burned, his supply of water cut off.
In him also, in Antony, I was permitted to witness this magnificent
spectacle twenty--what do I say?-a hundred times, so long as he loved me
with all the ardour of his fiery soul. But what happened at Actium? That
shameful flight of the cooing dove after his mate, at which generations
yet unborn will point in mockery! He who does not see more deeply will
attribute to the foolish madness of love this wretched forgetfulness of
duty, honour, fame, the present and the future; but I, Iras--and this
is the thought which whitens one hair after another, which will speedily
destroy the remnant of your mistress's former beauty by the exhaustion
of sleepless nights--I know better. It was not love which drew Antony
after me, not love that trampled in the dust the radiant image of
reckless courage, not love that constrained the demigod to follow the
pitiful track of a fugitive woman."

Here her voice fell, and seizing the girl's wrist with a painful
pressure, she drew her closer to her side and whispered:

"The goblet of Nektanebus is connected with it. Ay, tremble! The powers
that emanate from the glittering wonder are as terrible as they are
unnatural. The magic spell exerted by the beaker has transformed the
heroic son of Herakles, the more than mortal, into the whimpering
coward, the crushed, broken nonentity I found upon the galley's deck.
You are