Bring me something to eat."

"What do you want?"

"What you please, Amrah. I am not sick, but indifferent. Life does
not seem as pleasant as it did this morning. A new ailment, O my
Amrah; and you who know me so well, who never failed me, may think
of the things now that answer for food and medicine. Bring me what
you choose."

Amrah's questions, and the voice in which she put them--low,
sympathetic, and solicitous--were significant of an endeared
relation between the two. She laid her hand upon his forehead;
then, as satisfied, went out, saying, "I will see."

After a while she returned, bearing on a wooden platter a bowl of
milk, some thin cakes of white bread broken, a delicate paste of
brayed wheat, a bird broiled, and honey and salt. On one end of
the platter there was a silver goblet full of wine, on the other
a brazen hand-lamp lighted.

The room was then revealed: its walls smoothly plastered; the ceiling
broken by great oaken rafters, brown with rain stains and time; the
floor of small diamond-shaped white and blue tiles, very firm and
enduring; a few stools with legs carved in imitation of the legs
of lions; a divan raised a little above the floor, trimmed with
blue cloth, and partially covered by an immense striped woollen
blanket or shawl--in brief, a Hebrew bedroom.

The same light also gave the woman to view. Drawing a stool to
the divan, she placed the platter upon it, then knelt close
by ready to serve him. Her face was that of a woman of fifty,
dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and at the moment softened by a look
of tenderness almost maternal. A white turban covered her head,
leaving the lobes of the ear exposed, and in them the sign that
settled her condition--an orifice bored by a thick awl. She was
a slave, of Egyptian origin, to whom not even the sacred fiftieth
year could have brought freedom; nor would she have accepted it,
for the boy she was attending was her life. She had nursed him
through babyhood, tended him as a child, and could not break
the service. To her love he could never be a man.

He spoke but once during the meal.

"You remember, O my Amrah," he said, "the Messala who used to
visit me here days at a time."

"I remember him."

"He went to Rome some years ago, and is now back. I called upon
him to-day."

A shudder of disgust seized the lad.

"I knew something had happened," she said, deeply interested.
"I never liked the Messala. Tell me all."

But he fell into musing, a