Seti, perhaps discovered all my preparations, when seeking me in my room!  For two days and nights I have allowed myself to be drawn away from my work, for the sake of this child.  Were I one of the laity, whom you would approach, I should say that demons had bewitched me.  But it is not that,”—­and with these words the physician’s eyes flamed up—­“it is not that!  The animal in me, the low instincts of which the heart is the organ, and which swelled my breast at her bedside, they have mastered the pure and fine emotions here—­here in this brain; and in the very moment when I hoped to know as the God knows whom you call the Prince of knowledge, in that moment I must learn that the animal in me is stronger than that which I call my God.”

The physician, agitated and excited, had fixed his eyes on the ground during these last words, and hardly noticed the poet, who listened to him wondering and full of sympathy.  For a time both were silent; then Pentaur laid his hand on his friend’s hand, and said cordially: 

“My soul is no stranger to what you feel, and heart and head, if I may use your own words, have known a like emotion.  But I know that what we feel, although it may be foreign to our usual sensations, is loftier and more precious than these, not lower.  Not the animal, Nebsecht, is it that you feel in yourself, but God.  Goodness is the most beautiful attribute of the divine, and you have always been well-disposed towards great and small; but I ask you, have you ever before felt so irresistibly impelled to pour out an ocean of goodness on another being, whether for Uarda you would not more joyfully and more self-forgetfully sacrifice all that you have, and all that you are, than to father and mother and your oldest friend?”

Nebsecht nodded assentingly.

“Well then,” cried Pentaur, “follow your new and godlike emotion, be good to Uarda and do not sacrifice her to your vain wishes.  My poor friend!  With your—­enquiries into the secrets of life, you have never looked round upon itself, which spreads open and inviting before our eyes.  Do you imagine that the maiden who can thus inflame the calmest thinker in Thebes, will not be coveted by a hundred of the common herd when her protector fails her?  Need I tell you that amongst the dancers in the foreign quarter nine out of ten are the daughters of outlawed parents?  Can you endure the thought that by your hand innocence may be consigned to vice, the rose trodden under foot in the mud?  Is the human heart that you desire, worth an Uarda?  Now go, and to-morrow come again to me your friend who understands how to sympathize with all you feel, and to whom you have approached so much the nearer to-day that you have learned to share his purest happiness.”

Pentaur held out his hand to the physician, who held it some time, then went thoughtfully and lingeringly, unmindful of the burning glow of the mid-day sun, over the mountain into the valley of the king’s graves towards the hut of the paraschites.