and
covered with ornamental paintings, bore at its upper end a sculptured
head of Hathor surmounted by an ostrich-plume. The nine cords were
stretched diagonally and quivered under the long, slender hands of the
harpist, who often, in order to reach the lower notes, bent with a
sinuous motion as if she were about to float on the waves of music and
accompany the vanishing harmony.

Behind her stood another musician, who might have been thought nude but
for the faint white haze which toned the bronze colour of her body. She
played on a sort of guitar with an exceedingly long handle, the three
cords of which were coquettishly adorned at their extremity with
coloured tufts. One of her arms, slender yet round, grasped the top of
the handle with a sculptural pose, while the other upheld the instrument
and touched the strings.

A third young woman, whose enormous mass of hair made her look all the
more slender, beat time upon a tympanum formed of a wooden frame
slightly curved inward, on which was stretched an onager-skin.

The harpist sang a plaintive melody, accompanied in unison,
inexpressibly sad. The words breathed vague aspirations, vague regrets,
a hymn of love to the unknown, and timid plaints of the rigour of the
gods and the cruelty of fate. Tahoser, leaning upon one of the lions of
her armchair, her hand under her cheek and her finger curved against her
temple, listened with inattention more apparent than real, to the song
of the musician. At times a sigh made her breast heave and raised the
enamels of her necklace. Sometimes a moist light caused by a growing
tear shone in her eye between the lines of antimony, and her tiny teeth
bit her lower lip as if she were fighting her own emotion.

"Satou," she said, clapping her delicate hands together to silence the
musician, who at once deadened with her palm the vibrations of the harp,
"your song enervates me, makes me languid, and would make me giddy like
overpowerful perfumes. The strings of your harp seem to be twisted with
the vibrations of my heart and sound painfully within my breast. You
make me almost ashamed, for it is my soul that mourns in your music. Who
can have told you my secrets?"

"Mistress," replied the harpist, "the poet and the musician know
everything; the gods reveal hidden things to them; they express in their
rhythm what the thought scarcely conceives and what the tongue
confusedly stammers. But if my song saddens you, I can, by changing its