“The king toils; the priests toil; the powers of the world labor.  None but the beautiful idle may be idle, and that for their beauty’s sake.  Nay, it is not that I may not work, but I may not work as I wish and I am heart-sick therefore.”

His last words ended in a tone of genuine dejection.  His eyes were fixed on the grass of the nook and his brows had knitted slightly.  The expression was a rare one for his face and in its way becoming—­for the moment at least.  The hand he had patted drew nearer, and at last, after a little hesitancy, was laid on his black hair.  He lifted his face and took cheer, from the light in her eyes, to proceed.

“Since I may speak,” he began, “I shall.  Ta-meri, thou knowest that as a sculptor I work within limits.  The stature of mine art must crouch under the bounds of the ritual.  It is not boasting if I say that I see, with brave eyes, that Egypt insults herself when she creates horrors in stone and says, ‘This is my idea of art.’  And these things are not human; neither are they beasts—­they are grotesques that verge so near upon a semblance of living things as to be piteous.  They thwart the purpose of sculpture.  Why do we carve at all, if not to show how we appear to the world or the world appears to us?  Now for my rebellion.  I would carve as we are made; as we dispose ourselves; aye, I would display a man’s soul in his face and write his history on his brow.  I would people Egypt with a host of beauty, grace and naturalness—­”

“Just as if they were alive?” Ta-meri inquired with interest.

“Even so—­of such naturalness that one could guess only by the hue of the stone that they did not breathe.”

The lady shrugged her shoulders and laughed a little.

“But they do not carve that way,” she protested.  “It is not sculpture.  Thou wouldst fill the land with frozen creatures—­ai!” with another little shrug.  “It would be haunted and spectral.  Nay, give me the old forms.  They are best.”

Kenkenes fairly gasped with his sudden descent from earnest hope to disappointment.  A flood of half-angry shame dyed his face and the wound to his sensibilities showed its effect so plainly that the beauty noted it with a sudden burst of compunction.

“Of a truth,” she added, her voice grown wondrous soft, “I am full of sympathy for thee, Kenkenes.  Nay, look up.  I can not be happy if thou art not.”

“That suffices.  I am cheered,” he began, but the note of sarcasm in his voice was too apparent for him to permit himself to proceed.  He caught up the lyre, and drawing up a diphros—­a double seat of fine woods—­rested against it and began to improvise with an assumption of carelessness.  Ta-meri sank back in her chair and regarded him from under dreamy lids—­her senses charmed, her light heart won by his comeliness and talent.  Kenkenes became conscious of her inspection, at last, and looked up at her.  His eyes were still bright with his recent feeling and the hue in his cheeks a little deeper.  The admiration in her face became so speaking that he smiled and ran without pausing into one of the love-lyrics of the day.  Breaking off in its midst, he dropped the lyre and said with honest apology in his voice: