“That is done.  Farewell, Pentaur.”

But the poet held the physician back; he spoke to him with the warmest words, and conjured him to abandon his enterprise.  His prayers, however, had no power to touch Nebsecht, who only strove forcibly to disengage his finger from Pentaur’s strong hand, which held him as in a clasp of iron.  The excited poet did not remark that he was hurting his friend, until after a new and vain attempt at freeing himself, Nebsecht cried out in pain, “You are crushing my finger!”

A smile passed over the poet’s face, he loosened his hold on the physician, and stroked the reddened hand like a mother who strives to divert her child from pain.

“Don’t be angry with me, Nebsecht,” he said, “you know my unlucky fists, and to-day they really ought to hold you fast, for you have too mad a purpose on hand.”

“Mad?” said the physician, whilst he smiled in his turn.  “It may be so; but do you not know that we Egyptians all have a peculiar tenderness for our follies, and are ready to sacrifice house and land to them?”

“Our own house and our own land,” cried the poet:  and then added seriously, “but not the existence, not the happiness of another.”

“Have I not told you that I do not look upon the heart as the seat of our intelligence?  So far as I am concerned, I would as soon be buried with a ram’s heart as with my own.”

“I do not speak of the plundered dead, but of the living,” said the poet.  “If the deed of the paraschites is discovered, he is undone, and you would only have saved that sweet child in the hut behind there, to fling her into deeper misery.”

Nebsecht looked at the other with as much astonishment and dismay, as if he had been awakened from sleep by bad tidings.  Then he cried:  “All that I have, I would share with the old man and Uarda.”

“And who would protect her?”

“Her father.”

“That rough drunkard who to-morrow or the day after may be sent no one knows where.”

“He is a good fellow,” said the physician interrupting his friend, and stammering violently.  “But who ’would do anything to the child?  She is so so ....  She is so charming, so perfectly—­sweet and lovely.”

With these last words he cast down his eyes and reddened like a girl.

“You understand that,” he said, “better than I do; yes, and you also think her beautiful!  Strange! you must not laugh if I confess—­I am but a man like every one else—­when I confess, that I believe I have at length discovered in myself the missing organ for beauty of form—­not believe merely, but truly have discovered it, for it has not only spoken, but cried, raged, till I felt a rushing in my ears, and for the first time was attracted more by the sufferer than by suffering.  I have sat in the hut as though spell-bound, and gazed at her hair, at her eyes, at how she breathed.  They must long since have missed me at the House of