“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 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.