Nefert had meanwhile left her shady retreat and come towards him.

She silently accepted the water he offered her, and drank it with delight, to the very dregs.

“’Thank you,” she said, when she had recovered breath after her eager draught.

“That has done me good!  How fresh and acid the water tastes; but your hand shakes, and you are heated by your quick run for me—­poor man.”

With these words she looked at him with a peculiar expressive glance of her large eyes, and gave him her right hand, which he pressed wildly to his lips.

“That will do,” she said smiling; “here comes the princess with a priest, out of the hovel of the unclean.  With what frightful words you terrified me just now.  It is true I gave you just cause to be angry with me; but now you are kind again—­do you hear?—­and will bring your mother again to see mine.  Not a word.  I shall see, whether cousin Paaker refuses me obedience.”

She threatened him playfully with her finger, and then growing grave she added, with a look that pierced Paaker’s heart with pain, and yet with ecstasy, “Let us leave off quarrelling.  It is so much better when people are kind to each other.”

After these words she walked towards the house of the paraschites, while Paaker pressed his hands to his breast, and murmured: 

“The drink is working, and she will be mine.  I thank ye—­ye Immortals!”

But this thanksgiving, which hitherto he had never failed to utter when any good fortune had befallen him, to-day died on his lips.  Close before him he saw the goal of his desires; there, under his eyes, lay the magic spring longed for for years.  A few steps farther, and he might slake at its copious stream his thirst both for love and for revenge.

While he followed the wife of Mena, and replaced the phial carefully in his girdle, so as to lose no drop of the precious fluid which, according to the prescription of the old woman, he needed to use again, warning voices spoke in his breast, to which he usually listened as to a fatherly admonition; but at this moment he mocked at them, and even gave outward expression to the mood that ruled him—­for he flung up his right hand like a drunken man, who turns away from the preacher of morality on his way to the wine-cask; and yet passion held him so closely ensnared, that the thought that he should live through the swift moments which would change him from an honest man into a criminal, hardly dawned, darkly on his soul.  He had hitherto dared to indulge his desire for love and revenge in thought only, and had left it to the Gods to act for themselves; now he had taken his cause out of the hand of the Celestials, and gone into action without them, and in spite of them.

The sorceress Hekt passed him; she wanted to see the woman for whom she had given him the philter.  He perceived her and shuddered, but soon the old woman vanished among the rocks muttering.