intended to return to the capital
immediately. Whether he meant to leave her in the lurch after using her
for his selfish purposes, she also desired to learn from the sorceress.
But she would ask him that question herself to-morrow. Woe betide him if
the spirits recognised in him the deceiver she now believed him.

Hitherto Tabus had listened quietly, but when she closed her passionate
threats with the exclamation that he also deserved punishment for
alienating Gula, the sailor's wife, from her absent husband, the
enchantress also lost her composure and cried out angrily: "If that
is true, if the Greek really committed that crime--then certainly. The
foreigners destroy, with their laughing levity, much that is good among
us. We must endure it; but whoever broke the Biamite's marriage bond,
from the earliest times, forfeited his life, and so, the gods be
thanked, it has remained. This very last year the fisherman Phabis
killed with a hammer the Alexandrian clerk who had stolen into his
house, and drowned his faithless wife. But your lover--though you should
weep for sorrow till your eyes are red--"

"I would denounce the traitor, if he made himself worthy of death,"
Ledscha passionately interrupted, with flashing eyes. "What portion
of the slave's charge is true will appear at once--and if it proves
correct, to morrow's full moon shall indeed bring me the greatest bliss;
for though, when I was younger and happier, I contradicted Abus when he
declared that one thing surpassed even the raptures of love--satisfied
vengeance--now I would agree with him."

A loud cry of "Right! right!" from the old crone's lips expressed the
gray-haired Biamite's pleasure in this worthy daughter of her race.

Then she again gazed at the wine in the vessel, and this time she did so
silently, as if spellbound by the mirror on its bottom.

At last, raising her aged head, she said in a tone of the most sincere
compassion: "Poor child! Yes, you would be cruelly and shamefully
deceived. Tear your love for this man from your heart, like poisonous
hemlock. But the full moon which is to bring you great happiness is
scarcely the next, perhaps not even the one which follows it, but surely
and certainly a later one will rise, by whose light the utmost bliss
awaits you. True, I see it come from another man than the Greek."

The girl had listened with panting breath. She believed as firmly in the
infallibility of the knowledge which the witch received