nst sleep this night in an open boat?"

She nodded.

"To-morrow, then," he continued, taking her hand, "we shall reach
Nehapehu, where I can hide thee with some of the peasantry on my
father's lands. And there thou canst abide until I go to Tape and
return.

"Thou must know," he continued, explaining, "the Athor of the hills is
not my first sacrilege. Once I committed a worse. My father was the
royal sculptor to Rameses and is now Meneptah's murket." Rachel
glanced at him shyly and sought to withdraw her hand, for she
recognized the loftiness of the title. But he retained his clasp. "He
is a mighty genius. He planned and executed Ipsambul. For that, which
is the greatest monument to Rameses, the Incomparable Pharaoh loved
him, and while the king lived my father was overwhelmed with his
favors. Nor did the royal sculptor's good fortune wane, as is the
common fate of favorites, for the great king planned that my father's
house should be honored even after his death though the dynasties
change. So Rameses gave him a signet of lapis lazuli, and its
inscription commanded him who sat at any time thereafter on the throne
of Egypt to honor the prayer of its bearer in the unspeakable name of
the Holy One.

"After the death of Rameses," the narrator went on, "we went to Tape,
my father and I, to inscribe the hatchments and carve the scene of the
Judgment of the Dead in the tomb of the great king. Now, I am my
father's only child and have been taught his craft. I have been an apt
pupil, and he had no fear in trusting me with the execution of the
fresco. I had long been in rebellion, practising in secret my lawless
ideas, and I was seized with an uncontrollable aversion to marring
those holy walls with the conventional ugliness commanded by the
ritual. I assembled my ideas and dared. I worked rapidly and well.
The work was done before my father discovered it." Kenkenes paused and
laughed a little.

"Suffice it to say the fresco was erased. And the solemnity of the
crypt was hardly restored before my father found that his sacred
signet, which he always wore, was gone. Nay, nay, I might not search
for it more than the fruitless once, for he declared, and of a truth
believed firmly, that the great king had reclaimed his gift. I did not
and never have I believed it. Now I need the signet and I shall go
after it on the strength of that belief.

"Having found it, I shall appeal to Meneptah for thy liberty and