e
hardness in his nature.

But as she lay there, her dark hair streaming over the yellow silk of
her pillows, her mind strayed from her lover to the life before her, and
the picture rose quickly in her imagination. She even took up the silver
mirror that lay beside her and looked at herself by the dim light of the
little lamp, and said to herself that she was beautiful, and that many
in Shushan would do her homage. She was glad that Atossa was so fair--it
would be a better contrast for her own dark southern beauty.

Towards morning she slept, and dreamed of the grand figure of the
prophet, as she had seen him stretched upon his death-bed in the upper
chamber of the tower; she thought the dead man stirred and opened his
glazed eyes and pointed at her with his bony fingers, and spoke words of
anger and reproach. Then she woke with a short cry in her terror, and
the light of the dawn shone gray and clear through the doorway of the
corridor at the end of her room, where two of her handmaids slept across
the threshold, their white cloaks drawn over their heads against the
chill air of the night.

Then the trumpets rang out in long-drawn clanging rhythm through the
morning air, and Nehushta heard the trampling of the beasts that were
being got ready for the journey, in the court without, and the cries of
the drivers and of the serving-men. She rose quickly from her bed--a
lithe white-clad figure in the dawn light--and pushed the heavy curtains
aside and looked out through the lattice; and she forgot her evil dream,
for her heart leaped again at the thought that she should no more be
shut up in Ecbatana, and that before another month was over she would be
in Shushan, in the palace, where she longed to be.

CHAPTER V.

The sun was almost setting, and his light was already turning to a
golden glow upon the vast plain of Shushan, as the caravan of travellers
halted for the last time. A few stades away the two mounds rose above
the royal city like two tables out of the flat country; the lower one
surmounted by the marble columns, the towers and turrets and gleaming
architraves of the palace; and in front, upon the right, the higher
elevation crowned by the dark and massive citadel of frowning walls and
battlements. The place chosen for the halt was the point where the road
from Nineveh, into which they had turned when about half-way from
Ecbatana, joined the broad road from Babylon, near to the bridge. For
some time