Kenkenes caught himself looking sharply at each face as he passed, for it contained somewhat of that for which he sought.  As he walked along looking after them he became aware that some one was near him, He turned his head and stopped in his tracks.

He confronted his idea embodied—­Athor, the Golden!

It was an Israelitish maiden, barely sixteen years old, but in all his life he had never looked upon such beauty.  He had gazed with pleased eyes on the slender blush-tinted throats and wrists of the Egyptian beauties, but never had he beheld such whiteness of flesh as this.  He had sunk himself in the depths of the dusky, amorous eyes of high-born women of Memphis, but here were fathomless profundities of azure that abashed the heavens.  He had been very near to loveliest hair of Egypt, so close that its odorous filaments had blown across his face and his artist senses had been caught and tangled in its ebon sorcery.  But down each side this broad brow was a rippling wave of gold, over each shoulder a heavy braid of gold that fell, straightened by its own weight, a span below the waist.  The winds of the desert had roughened it and the bright threads made a nimbus about the head.  Its glory overreached his senses and besieged his soul.  Here was not witchery, but exaltation.

Enraptured with her beauty, her perfect fulfilment of his needs, he realized last the unlovely features of her presence.  She balanced a heavy water pitcher on her head and wore a rough surplice, more decorous than the dress of the average bondwoman, but the habit of a slave, nevertheless.  He had halted directly in her path, and after a moment’s hesitancy she passed around him and went on.

Immediately Kenkenes recovered himself and with a few steps overtook her.  Without ceremony he transferred the heavy pitcher to his own shoulder.  The girl turned her perfect face, full of amazement, to him, and a wave of color dyed it swiftly.

“Thy burden is heavy, maiden,” was all he said.

The bulk of the jar on the farther shoulder made it necessary for him to turn his face toward her, but she was uneasy under the intent gaze of his level black eyes.  She dropped behind him, but he slackened his pace and kept beside her.  For the moment he was no longer the man of pulse and susceptibility but the artist.  Therefore her thoughts and sensations were apart from his concern.  The unfamiliar perfection of the Semitic countenance bewildered him.  He took up his panegyric.  Never was a mortal countenance so near divine.  And the sumptuousness of her figure—­its faultless curves and lines, its lissome roundness, its young grace, the beauty of arm and neck and ankle!  Ah! never did anything entirely earthly dwell in so fair, so splendid a form.

As they neared the camp the girl spoke to him for the first time.  He recognized in her voice the same serene tone he had noted in his talk with the Hebrew some days before.