At first her thoughts wandered to and fro like a dove ere it chooses
the direction of its flight; but after the question why she was having
a tomb built so hurriedly, when she would be permitted to live, her mind
found the right track. Among the Scythian guards, the Mauritanians, and
Blemmyes in the army there were plenty of savage fellows whom a word
from her lips and a handful of gold would have set upon the vanquished
Antony, as the huntsman's "Seize him!" urges the hounds. A hint, and
among the wretched magicians and Magians in the Rhakotis, the Egyptian
quarter of the city, twenty men would have assassinated him by poison or
wily snares; one command to the Macedonians in the guard of the Mellakes
or youths, and he would be a captive that very day, and to-morrow, if
she so ordered, on the way to Asia, whither Octavianus, as Timagenes
told her, had gone.

What prevented her from grasping the gold, giving the hint, issuing the
command?

Doubtless she thought of the magic goblet, now melted, which had
constrained him to cast aside honour, fame, and power, as worthless
rubbish, in order to obey her behest not to leave her; but though this
remembrance burdened her soul, it had no decisive influence. It was
no one thing which prisoned her hand and lips, but every fibre of her
being, every pulsation of her heart, every glance back into the past to
the confines of childhood.

Yet she listened to other thoughts also. They reminded her of her
children, the elation of power, love for the land of her ancestors, and
the peril which menaced it without her, the bliss of seeing the
light, and the darkness, the silence, the dull rigidity of death, the
destruction of the body and the mind cherished and developed with so
much care and toil, the horrible torture which might be associated with
the transition from life to death--the act of dying. And what lay
before her in the existence which lasted an eternity? When she no longer
breathed beneath the sun, even if the death hour was deferred, and she
found that not Epicurus, who believed that with death all things ended,
had been right, but the ancient teachings of the Egyptians, what would
await her in that world beyond the grave if she purchased a few more
years of life by the murder or betrayal of her lover, her husband?

Yet perhaps the punishments inflicted upon the condemned were but
bugbears invented by the priesthood, which guarded the regulation of the
state in order to cu