“Perchance she speaks truth, Brother,” said the Prince, “and if we took her home we might earn no small reward from Jabez the Levite.  But first tell me, Maiden, what was that prayer which you made to the moon, that Hathor should help your heart?”

“Sir,” she answered, “only the idolatrous Egyptians pray to Hathor, the Lady of Love.”

“I thought that all the world prayed to the Lady of Love, Maiden.  But what of the prayer?  Is there some man whom you desire?”

“None,” she answered angrily.

“Then why does your heart need so much help that you ask it of the air?  Is there perchance someone whom you do not desire?”

She hung her head and made no answer.

“Come, Brother,” said the Prince, “this lady is weary of us, and I think that if she were a true woman she would answer our questions more readily.  Let us go and leave her.  As she cannot walk we can take her later if we wish.”

“Sirs,” she said, “I am glad that you are going, since the hyenas will be safer company than two men who can threaten to sell a helpless woman into slavery.  Yet as we part to meet no more I will answer your question.  In the prayer to which you were not ashamed to listen I did not pray for any lover, I prayed to be rid of one.”

“Now, Ana,” said the Prince bursting into laughter and throwing back his dark cloak, “do you discover the name of that unhappy man of whom the lady Merapi wishes to be rid, for I dare not.”

She gazed into his face and uttered a little cry.

“Ah!” she said, “I thought I knew the voice again when once you forget your part.  Prince Seti, does your Highness think that this was a kind jest to practise upon one alone and in fear?”

“Lady Merapi,” he answered smiling, “be not wroth, for at least it was a good one and you have told us nothing that we did not know.  You may remember that at Tanis you said that you were affianced and there was that in your voice——.  Suffer me now to tend this wound of yours.”

Then he knelt down, tore a strip from his ceremonial robe of fine linen, and began to bind up her foot, not unskilfully, being a man full of strange and unexpected knowledge.  As he worked at the task, watching them, I saw their eyes meet, saw too that rich flood of colour creep once more to Merapi’s brow.  Then I began to think it unseemly that the Prince of Egypt should play the leech to a woman’s hurts, and to wonder why he had not left that humble task to me.

Presently the bandaging was done and made fast with a royal scarabaeus mounted on a pin of gold, which the Prince wore in his garments.  On it was cut the uraeus crown and beneath it were the signs which read “Lord of the Lower and the Upper Land,” being Pharaoh’s style and title.

“See now, Lady,” he said, “you have Egypt beneath your foot,” and when she asked him what he meant, he read her the writing upon the jewel, whereat for the third time she coloured to the eyes.  Then he lifted her up, instructing her to rest her weight upon his shoulder, saying he feared lest the scarab, which he valued, should be broken.