s and straw, roughly thrown
together. A heart-rending cry of pain from within the hut trembled in
the air and arrested the steps of the two women. Nefert staggered and
clung to her stronger companion, whose beating heart she seemed to hear.
Both stood a few minutes as if spellbound, then the princess called
Paaker, and said:

"You go first into the house."

Paaker bowed to the ground.

"I will call the man out," he said, "but how dare we step over his
threshold. Thou knowest such a proceeding will defile us."

Nefert looked pleadingly at Bent-Anat, but the princess repeated her
command.

"Go before me; I have no fear of defilement." The Mohar still hesitated.

"Wilt thou provoke the Gods?--and defile thyself?" But the princess let
him say no more; she signed to Nefert, who raised her hands in horror
and aversion; so, with a shrug of her shoulders, she left her companion
behind with the Mohar, and stepped through an opening in the hedge into
a little court, where lay two brown goats; a donkey with his forelegs
tied together stood by, and a few hens were scattering the dust about in
a vain search for food.

Soon she stood, alone, before the door of the paraschites' hovel. No one
perceived her, but she could not take her eyes-accustomed only to scenes
of order and splendor--from the gloomy but wonderfully strange picture,
which riveted her attention and her sympathy. At last she went up to
the doorway, which was too low for her tall figure. Her heart shrunk
painfully within her, and she would have wished to grow smaller, and,
instead of shining in splendor, to have found herself wrapped in a
beggar's robe.

Could she step into this hovel decked with gold and jewels as if in
mockery?--like a tyrant who should feast at a groaning table and compel
the starving to look on at the banquet. Her delicate perception made
her feel what trenchant discord her appearance offered to all that
surrounded her, and the discord pained her; for she could not conceal
from herself that misery and external meanness were here entitled to
give the key-note and that her magnificence derived no especial grandeur
from contrast with all these modest accessories, amid dust, gloom, and
suffering, but rather became disproportionate and hideous, like a giant
among pigmies.

She had already gone too far to turn back, or she would willingly have
done so. The longer she gazed into the but, the more deeply she felt the
impotence of her princely po