When the queen parted with her guests she put her arms around Cornelia’s waist and kissed her on the forehead.

“I sent for you,” said Cleopatra, “half intending to amuse myself with the boorishness and clumsy insolence which I conceived a noble Roman lady to possess.  I have been punished.  Promise to come to see me often, very often, or I shall call my body-guards and keep you prisoner.  For I have very few friends.”

While the chariot was bearing the two guests away, Cleomenes asked Cornelia what she thought of the queen.

“She is the most wonderful woman I have ever met,” was her answer, enthusiastic and characteristically feminine.  “I admire her.  I am almost her slave.”

The frequency of Cornelia’s visits to the palace on following days seemed to prove that the admiration was not unreciprocated.  Indeed, Monime and Berenice grew jealous of the queen for stealing their new friend from them.

Chapter XXI

How Ulamhala’s Words Came True

I

The sentries were going their rounds; the camp-fires were burning low.  Over on the western hills bounding the Thessalian plain-land lingered the last bars of light.  It was oppressively warm, and man and beast were utterly fatigued.  Quintus Drusus stripped off his armour, and flung himself on the turf inside his tattered leather tent.  Vast had been the changes eighteen months of campaigning had made in him.  He had fought in Italy, in Spain, in the long blockade of the Pompeians at Dyrrachium.  He had learned the art of war in no gentle school.  He had ceased even so much as to grumble inwardly at the hardships endured by the hard-pressed Caesarian army.  The campaign was not going well.  Pompeius had broken through the blockade; and now the two armies had been executing tedious manoeuvres, fencing for a vantage-ground before joining pitched battle.

Drusus was exceedingly weary.  The events of the past two years,—­loves, hates, pleasures, perils, battles,—­all coursed through his mind; the fairest and most hideous of things were blended into buzzing confusion; and out of that confusion came a dull consciousness that he, Quintus Drusus, was thoroughly weary of everything and anything—­was heavy of heart, was consumed with hatred, was chafing against a hundred barriers of time, space, and circumstance, and was utterly impotent to contend against them.

The Imperator—­how he loved and adored him!  Through all the campaigning nothing could seem to break the strength of that nervous, agile, finely strung physique.  Sleeping in carriages or litters; ever moving; dictating continually books and letters to a secretary if for an hour there was a halt; dictating even while on horseback, in fact, and composing two letters at the same time; riding the most ungovernable horses fearlessly and without a fall; galloping at