Presently little Seti awoke, and began to prattle about something he had dreamed.

“What did you dream, my son?” asked his father.

“I dreamed,” he answered in his baby talk, “that a woman, dressed as Mother was in the temple, took me by the hand and led me into the air.  I looked down, and saw you and Mother with white faces and crying.  I began to cry too, but the woman with the feather cap told me not as she was taking me to a beautiful big star where Mother would soon come to find me.”

The Prince and I looked at each other and Merapi feigned to busy herself with hushing the child to sleep again.  It drew towards midnight and still no one seemed minded to go to rest.  Old Bakenkhonsu appeared and began to say something about the night being very strange and unrestful, when, suddenly, a little bat that was flitting to and fro above us fell upon his head and thence to the ground.  We looked at it, and saw that it was dead.

“Strange that the creature should have died thus,” said Bakenkhonsu, when, behold! another fell to the ground near by.  The black kitten which belonged to Little Seti saw it fall and darted from beside his bed where it was sleeping.  Before ever it reached the bat, the creature wheeled round, stood upon its hind legs, scratching at the air about it, then uttered one pitiful cry and fell over dead.

We stared at it, when suddenly far away a dog howled in a very piercing fashion.  Then a cow began to bale as these beasts do when they have lost their calves.  Next, quite close at hand but without the gates, there arose the ear-curdling cry of a woman in agony, which on the instant seemed to be echoed from every quarter, till the air was full of wailing.

“Oh, Seti!  Seti!” exclaimed Merapi, in a voice that was rather a hiss than a whisper, “look at your son!”

We sprang to where the babe lay, and looked.  He had awakened and was staring upward with wide-opened eyes and frozen face.  The fear, if such it were, passed from his features, though still he stared.  He rose to his little feet, always looking upwards.  Then a smile came upon his face, a most beautiful smile; he stretched out his arms, as though to clasp one who bent down towards him, and fell backwards—­quite dead.

Seti stood still as a statue; we all stood still, even Merapi.  Then she bend down, and lifted the body of the boy.

“Now, my lord,” she said, “there has fallen on you that sorrow which Jabez my uncle warned you would come, if ever you had aught to do with me.  Now the curse of Israel has pierced my heart, and now our child, as Ki the evil prophesied, has grown too great for greetings, or even for farewells.”

Thus she spoke in a cold and quiet voice, as one might speak of something long expected or foreseen, then made her reverence to the Prince, and departed, bearing the body of the child.  Never, I think, did Merapi seem more beautiful to me than in this, her hour of bereavement, since now through her woman’s loveliness shone out some shadow of the soul within.  Indeed, such were her eyes and such her movements that well might have been a spirit and not a woman who departed from us with that which had been her son.