hills; come, let us pray together for the king and for those we love in
the field. Each of you think of her own: you children of your fathers,
you women of your sons, and we wives of our distant husbands, and let us
entreat Amon that they may return to us as certainly as the sun, which
now leaves us, will rise again to-morrow morning."

Nefert knelt down, and with her the women and the children.

When they rose, a little girl went up to Nefert, and said, pulling her
dress: "Thou madest us kneel here yesterday, and already my mother is
better, because I prayed for her."

"No doubt," said Nefert, stroking the child's black hair.

She found Bent-Anat on the terrace meditatively gazing across to the
Necropolis, which was fading into darkness before her eyes. She started
when she heard the light footsteps of her friend.

"I am disturbing thee," said Nefert, about to retire.

"No, stay," said Bent-Anat. "I thank the Gods that I have you, for my
heart is sad--pitifully sad."

"I know where your thoughts were," said Nefert softly. "Well?" asked the
princess.

"With Pentaur."

"I think of him--always of him," replied the princess, "and nothing else
occupies my heart. I am no longer myself. What I think I ought not to
think, what I feel I ought not to feel, and yet, I cannot command it,
and I think my heart would bleed to death if I tried to cut out those
thoughts and feelings. I have behaved strangely, nay unbecomingly,
and now that which is hard to endure is hanging over me, something
strange-which will perhaps drive you from me back to your mother."

"I will share everything with you," cried Nefert. "What is going to
happen? Are you then no longer the daughter of Rameses?"

"I showed myself to the people as a woman of the people," answered
Bent-Anat, "and I must take the consequences. Bek en Chunsu,
the high-priest of Amon, has been with me, and I have had a long
conversation with him. The worthy man is good to me, I know, and my
father ordered me to follow his advice before any one's. He showed me
that I have erred deeply. In a state of uncleanness I went into one
of the temples of the Necropolis, and after I had once been into the
paraschites' house and incurred Ameni's displeasure, I did it a second
time. They know over there all that took place at the festival. Now I
must undergo purification, either with great solemnity at the hands of
Ameni himself, before all the priests and nobles in the House of
Seti, or