her."

"Which?" asked Ma-Mee. "I see several--also other men. She was the
wretch who rolled Egypt in the dirt and betrayed her. Oh, if it were not
for the law of peace by which we must abide when we meet thus!"

"You mean that she would be torn to shreds, Ma-Mee, and her very soul
scattered like the limbs of Osiris? Well, if it were not for that law of
peace, so perhaps would many of us, for never have I heard a single king
among these hundreds speak altogether well of those who went before or
followed after him."

"Especially of those who went before if they happen to have hammered out
their cartouches and usurped their monuments," said the queen, dryly,
and looking him in the eyes.

At this home-thrust the Pharaoh seemed to wince. Making no answer, he
pointed to the royal woman who had mounted the steps at the end of the
hall.

Queen Cleopatra lifted her hand and stood thus for a while. Very
splendid she was, and Smith, on his hands and knees behind the boarding
of the boat, thanked his stars that alone among modern men it had been
his lot to look upon her rich and living loveliness. There she shone,
she who had changed the fortunes of the world, she who, whatever she did
amiss, at least had known how to die.

Silence fell upon that glittering galaxy of kings and queens and upon
all the hundreds of their offspring, their women, and their great
officers who crowded the double tier of galleries around the hall.

"Royalties of Egypt," she began, in a sweet, clear voice which
penetrated to the farthest recesses of the place, "I, Cleopatra, the
sixth of that name and the last monarch who ruled over the Upper and the
Lower Lands before Egypt became a home of slaves, have a word to say
to your Majesties, who, in your mortal days, all of you more worthily
filled the throne on which once I sat. I do not speak of Egypt and its
fate, or of our sins--whereof mine were not the least--that brought her
to the dust. Those sins I and others expiate elsewhere, and of them,
from age to age, we hear enough. But on this one night of the year, that
of the feast of him whom we call Osiris, but whom other nations have
known and know by different names, it is given to us once more to be
mortal for an hour, and, though we be but shadows, to renew the loves
and hates of our long-perished flesh. Here for an hour we strut in our
forgotten pomp; the crowns that were ours still adorn our brows, and
once more we seem to listen to our people