take up her burden again.

At sunset he retired cautiously, but several dawns found him among the
rocks, with reed pen, papyri and molds of clay. When he climbed to his
retreat within the walls of stone, on the hillside in the late
afternoon, he hid several studies of the girl's head and statuettes of
clay under the matting.

At last he began the creation of Athor the Golden. For days he labored
feverishly, forgetting to eat, fretting because the sun set and the
darkness held sway for so long. Having overstepped the law, he placed
no limit to the extent of his artistic transgression.

After choosing nature as his model, he followed it slavishly. On the
occasion of his initial departure from the accepted rules, he had never
dreamed it possible to disregard ritualistic commandments so
absolutely. He even ignored the passive and meditative repose,
immemorial on the carven countenances of Egypt.

The face of Athor, as she put forth her arms to receive the sun, must
show love, submission, eagerness and great appeal.

As Kenkenes said this thing to himself, he lowered chisel and mallet
and paused. Posture and form would avail nothing without these
emotions written on the face. He began to wonder if he might carve
them, unaided. He had not found them in the Israelite, and he
confessed to himself, with a little laugh, a doubt that he should ever
see them on her countenance.

Then a vagabond impulse presented itself unbidden in his mind and was
frowned down with a blush of apology to himself. And yet he remembered
his coquetry with the Lady Ta-meri as some small defense in the form of
precedent.

"Nay," he replied to this evidence, "it is a different woman. Between
myself and Ta-meri it is even odds, and the vanquished will have
deserved his defeat."

That evening--it was several days after the face of the goddess had
begun to emerge from the block of stone--he went to the upper end of
the gorge and passed through the camp on his way home, that he might
meet his model.

The laborers had not returned from the quarries, though the evening
meal bubbled and fumed over the fires in the narrow avenue between the
tents. Kenkenes passed by on the outskirts of the encampment and went
on.

Deep shadow lay on the stone-pits when Kenkenes reached the mouth of
the gorge, and a cool wind from the Nile swept across the grain. The
day's work had been prolonged in the lowering of a huge slab from its
position in its nat