“Thy plaything!” answered Nefert, and a flash of displeasure sparkled in her eyes.  “Thou art right to call me so, for I deserve no better name.  I have submitted all my life to be nothing but the plaything of others.”

“But, Nefert, I do not know you again,” cried Bent-Anat.  “Is this my gentle amiable dreamer?”

“That is the word I wanted,” said Nefert in a low tone.  “I slept, and dreamed, and dreamed on—­till Mena awoke me; and when he left me I went to sleep again, and for two whole years I have lain dreaming; but to-day I have been torn from my dreams so suddenly and roughly, that I shall never find any rest again.”

While she spoke, heavy tears fell slowly one after another over her cheeks.

Bent-Anat felt what she saw and heard as deeply as if Nefert were her own suffering child.  She lovingly drew the young wife down by her side on the divan, and insisted on Nefert’s letting her know all that troubled her spirit.

Katuti’s daughter had in the last few hours felt like one born blind, and who suddenly receives his sight.  He looks at the brightness of the sun, and the manifold forms of the creation around him, but the beams of the day-star blind its eyes, and the new forms, which he has sought to guess at in his mind, and which throng round him in their rude reality, shock him and pain him.  To-day, for the first time, she had asked herself wherefore her mother, and not she herself, was called upon to control the house of which she nevertheless was called the mistress, and the answer had rung in her ears:  “Because Mena thinks you incapable of thought and action.”  He had often called her his little rose, and she felt now that she was neither more nor less than a flower that blossoms and fades, and only charms the eye by its color and beauty.

“My mother,” she said to Bent-Anat, “no doubt loves me, but she has managed badly for Mena, very badly; and I, miserable idiot, slept and dreamed of Mena, and saw and heard nothing of what was happening to his —­to our—­inheritance.  Now my mother is afraid of my husband, and those whom we fear, says my uncle, we cannot love, and we are always ready to believe evil of those we do not love.  So she lends an ear to those people who blame Mena, and say of him that he has driven me out of his heart, and has taken a strange woman to his tent.  But it is false and a lie; and I cannot and will not countenance my own mother even, if she embitters and mars what is left to me—­what supports me—­the breath and blood of my life—­my love, my fervent love for my husband.”

Bent-Anat had listened to her without interrupting her; she sat by her for a time in silence.  Then she said: 

“Come out into the gallery; then I will tell you what I think, and perhaps Toth may pour some helpful counsel into my mind.  I love you, and I know you well, and though I am not wise, I have my eyes open and a strong hand.  Take it, come with me on to the balcony.”