and to put him at once to death if he found him untruthful.  The man had arrived, broken with excessive fatigue and weak from the fearful journey; but under the very eye of the king, he had nevertheless given a clear and concise account of himself; and, though he betrayed considerable fear, he gave no reason for supposing that what he said was not true.  As for the queen, she sat calmly by, polishing her nails with a small instrument of ivory, occasionally asking a question, or making a remark, as though it were all the most natural occurrence in the world.

Darius was impetuous and fierce.  His intuitive decisions were generally right, and he acted upon them instantly, without hesitation; but he had no cunning and little strategy.  He was always for doing and never for waiting; and to the extreme rapidity of his movements he owed the success he had.  In the first three years of his reign he fought nineteen battles and vanquished nine self-styled kings; but he never, on any occasion, detected a conspiracy, nor destroyed a revolution before it had broken out openly.  He was often, therefore, at the mercy of Atossa and frequently found himself baffled by her power of concealing a subtle lie under the letter of truth, and by her supreme indifference and coldness of manner under the most trying circumstances.  In his simple judgment it was absolutely impossible for any one to lie directly without betraying some hesitation, and each time he endeavoured to place Atossa in some difficult position, when she must, he thought, inevitably betray herself, he was met by her inexplicable calm; which he was forced to attribute to the fact that she was in the right—­no matter how the evidence might be against her.

The king decided that he had made a mistake in the present instance and that Phraortes was innocent of any idea of revolution.  He could not conceive how such a man should be capable of executing a daring stroke of policy.  He determined to let him go.

“You ought to be well satisfied with the result of these accounts,” he said, staring hard at Atossa.  “You see you know more of your affairs, and sooner, than you could have known if you had sent your letter.  Let this fellow go, and tell him to send his accounts regularly in future, or he will have the pains of riding hither in haste to deliver them.  Thou mayest go now and take thy rest,” he added, rising and pushing the willing Phraortes before him out of the room.

“Thou hast done well.  I am satisfied with thee, Phraortes,” said Atossa coldly.

Once more the beautiful queen was left alone, and once more she looked at herself in the silver mirror, somewhat more critically than before.  It seemed to her as she gazed and turned first one side of her face to the light and then the other, that she was a shade paler than usual.  The change would have been imperceptible to any one else, but she noticed it with a little frown of disapproval.  But presently she smoothed her brow and smiled happily to herself.  She had sustained a terrible danger successfully.