raise
him, aided by her faithful companions.

Diomedes averred that he had never beheld a more piteous spectacle than
the gigantic man hovering between heaven and earth in the agonies of
death and, while suffering the most terrible torture, extending his arms
longingly towards the woman he loved. Though scarcely able to speak, he
tenderly called her name, but she made no reply; like Iras and Charmian,
she was exerting her whole strength at the windlass in the most
passionate effort to raise him. The rope running over the pulley cut her
tender hands; her beautiful face was terribly distorted; but she did not
pause until they had succeeded in lifting the burden of the dying man
higher and higher till he reached the floor of the scaffolding. The
frantic exertion by which the three women had succeeded in accomplishing
an act far beyond their strength, though it was doubled by the power of
the most earnest will and ardent longing, would nevertheless have failed
in attaining its object had not Diomedes, at the last moment, come to
their assistance. He was a strong man, and by his aid the dying Roman
was seized, drawn upon the scaffolding, and carried down the staircase
to the tomb in the first story.

When the wounded general had been laid on one of the couches with which
the great hall was already furnished, the private secretary retired,
but remained on the staircase, an unnoticed spectator, in order to be
at hand in case the Queen again needed his assistance. Flushed from the
terrible exertion which she had just made, with tangled, dishevelled
locks, gasping and moaning, Cleopatra, as if out of her senses, tore
open her robe, beat her breast, and lacerated it with her nails. Then,
pressing her own beautiful face on her lover's wound to stanch the
flowing blood, she lavished upon him all the endearing names which she
had bestowed on their love.

His terrible suffering made her forget her own and the sad fate
impending. Tears of pity fell like the refreshing drops of a shower upon
the still unwithered blossoms of their love, and brought those which,
during the preceding night, had revived anew, to their last magnificent
unfolding.

Boundless, limitless as her former passion for this man, was now the
grief with which his agonizing death filled her heart.

All that Mark Antony had been to her in the heyday of life, all their
mutual experiences, all that each had received from the other, had
returned to her memory in cle