r eyes.

"The grace of the All-Wise God bless thee!" cried the king, and it was
as though a sudden bright light shone upon his face. Then he kissed her
two hands fervently, and with one long look into her sorrowful eyes, he
turned and left her.

But no man saw the king that day, nor did any know where he was, saving
the two spearmen who stood at the door of his chamber. Within, he lay
upon his couch, dry-eyed and stark, staring at the painted carvings of
the ceiling.

CHAPTER XI.

The time passed, and it was eleven days since Zoroaster had set out. The
king and Nehushta had continued to meet in the garden as before, and
neither had ever referred to the day when the torrent of his heart had
been suddenly let loose. The hours sped quietly and swiftly, without any
event of importance. Only the strange bond, half friendship and half
love, had grown stronger than before; and Nehushta wondered how it was
that she could love two men so well, and yet so differently. Indeed they
were very different men. She loved Zoroaster, and yet it sometimes
seemed as though he would more properly have filled the place of a
friend than of a lover. Darius she had accepted as her friend, but there
were moments when she almost forgot that he was not something more. She
tried to think of her meeting with Zoroaster, whether it would be like
former meetings,--whether her heart would beat more strongly, or not
beat at all when her lips touched his as of old. Her judgment was
utterly disturbed and her heart no longer knew itself. She gave herself
over to the pleasure of the king's society in the abandonment of the
moment, half foreseeing that some great change was at hand, over which
she could exercise no control.

The sun was just risen, but the bridge over the quickly flowing Choaspes
was still in the shadow cast over the plain by the fortress and the
palace, when two horsemen appeared upon the road from Nineveh, riding
at full gallop, and, emerging from the blue mist that still lay over the
meadows, crossed the bridge and continued at full speed towards the
ascent to the palace.

The one rider was a dark, ill-favoured man, whose pale flaccid cheeks
and drooping form betrayed the utmost fatigue. A bolster was bound
across the withers of his horse and another on the croup, so that he sat
as in a sort of chair, but he seemed hardly able to support himself even
with this artificial assistance, and his body swayed from side to side