or after me can ever love a man as I loved Assa.  Why dost thou not laugh?  It must seem odd, too, to hear such a thing from the toothless mouth of an old witch.  He is dead, long since dead.  I hate him! and yet—­wild as it sounds—­I believe I love him yet.  And he loved me—­for two years; then he went to the war with Seti, and remained a long time away, and when I saw him again he had courted the daughter of some rich and noble house.  I was handsome enough still, but he never looked at me at the banquets.  I came across him at least twenty times, but he avoided me as if I were tainted with leprosy, and I began to fret, and fell ill of a fever.  The doctors said it was all over with me, so I sent him a letter in which there was nothing but these words:  ’Beki is dying, and would like to see Assa once more,’ and in the papyrus I put his first present—­a plain ring.  And what was the answer? a handful of gold!  Gold—­gold!  Thou may’st believe me, when I say that the sight of it was more torturing to my eyes than the iron with which they put out the eyes of criminals.  Even now, when I think of it—­But what do you men, you lords of rank and wealth, know of a breaking heart?  When two or three of you happen to meet, and if thou should’st tell the story, the most respectable will say in a pompous voice:  ’The man acted nobly indeed; he was married, and his wife would have complained with justice if he had gone to see the singer.’  Am I right or wrong?  I know; not one will remember that the other was a woman, a feeling human being; it will occur to no one that his deed on the one hand saved an hour of discomfort, and on the other wrought half a century of despair.  Assa escaped his wife’s scolding, but a thousand curses have fallen on him and on his house.  How virtuous he felt himself when he had crushed and poisoned a passionate heart that had never ceased to love him!  Ay, and he would have come if he had not still felt some love for me, if he had not misdoubted himself, and feared that the dying woman might once more light up the fire he had so carefully smothered and crushed out.  I would have grieved for him—­ but that he should send me money, money!—­that I have never forgiven; that he shall atone for in his grandchild.”  The old woman spoke the last words as if in a dream, and without seeming to remember her hearer.  Ani shuddered, as if he were in the presence of a mad woman, and he involuntarily drew his chair back a little way.

The witch observed this; she took breath and went on:  “You lords, who walk in high places, do not know how things go on in the depths beneath you; you do not choose to know.