“So it is still spoken, and there is yet an Egypt?  And what Pharaoh sits upon the throne?  Still one of the spawn of the Persian Ochus, or are the Achaemenians gone, for far is it to the days of Ochus.”

“The Persians have been gone for Egypt for nigh two thousand years, and since then the Ptolemies, the Romans, and many others have flourished and held sway upon the Nile, and fallen when their time was ripe,” I said, aghast.  “What canst thou know of the Persian Artaxerxes?”

She laughed, and made no answer, and again a cold chill went through me.  “And Greece,” she said; “is there still a Greece?  Ah, I loved the Greeks.  Beautiful were they as the day, and clever, but fierce at heart and fickle, notwithstanding.”

“Yes,” I said, “there is a Greece; and, just now, it is once more a people.  Yet the Greeks of to-day are not what the Greeks of the old time were, and Greece herself is but a mockery of the Greece that was.”

“So!  The Hebrews, are they yet at Jerusalem?  And does the Temple that the wise king built stand, and if so what God do they worship therein?  Is their Messiah come, of whom they preached so much and prophesied so loudly, and doth He rule the earth?”

“The Jews are broken and gone, and the fragments of their people strew the world, and Jerusalem is no more.  As for the temple that Herod built——­”

“Herod!” she said.  “I know not Herod.  But go on.”

“The Romans burnt it, and the Roman eagles flew across its ruins, and now Judaea is a desert.”

“So, so!  They were a great people, those Romans, and went straight to their end—­ay, they sped to it like Fate, or like their own eagles on their prey!—­and left peace behind them.”

“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” I suggested.

“Ah, thou canst speak the Latin tongue, too!” she said, in surprise.  “It hath a strange ring in my ears after all these days, and it seems to me that thy accent does not fall as the Romans put it.  Who was it wrote that?  I know not the saying, but it is a true one of that great people.  It seems that I have found a learned man—­one whose hands have held the water of the world’s knowledge.  Knowest thou Greek also?”

“Yes, oh Queen, and something of Hebrew, but not to speak them well.  They are all dead languages now.”

She clapped her hands in childish glee.  “Of a truth, ugly tree that thou art, thou growest the fruits of wisdom, oh Holly,” she said; “but of those Jews whom I hated, for they called me ‘heathen’ when I would have taught them my philosophy—­did their Messiah come, and doth He rule the world?”

“Their Messiah came,” I answered with reverence; “but He came poor and lowly, and they would have none of Him.  They scourged Him, and crucified Him upon a tree, but yet His words and His works live on, for He was the Son of God, and now of a truth He doth rule half the world, but not with an Empire of the World.”