“Pardon me,” he said again.  “Let me be near thee again as before, and drive thy chariot.  I live only through thee, I am of no worth but through thee, and by thy favor, my king, my lord, my father!”

Rameses signed to his favorite to rise.  “Your request was granted,” said he, “before you made it.  I am still in your debt on your fair wife’s account.  Thank Nefert—­not me, and let us give thanks to the Immortals this day with especial fervor.  What has it not brought forth for us!  It has restored to me you two friends, whom I regarded as lost to me, and has given me in Pentaur another son.”

A low whistle sounded through the night air; it was Katuti’s last signal.

Paaker blew up the tinder, laid it in the bole under the parapet, and then, unmindful of his own danger, raised himself to listen for any further words.

“I entreat thee,” said the Regent, approaching Rameses, “to excuse me.  I fully appreciate thy favors, but the labors of the last few days have been too much for me; I can hardly stand on my feet, and the guard of honor—­”

“Mena will watch,” said the king.  “Sleep in all security, cousin.  I will have it known to all men that I have put away from me all distrust of you.  Give the my night-robe, Mena.  Nay-one thing more I must tell you.  Youth smiles on the young, Ani.  Bent-Anat has chosen a worthy husband, my preserver, the poet Pentaur.  He was said to be a man of humble origin, the son of a gardener of the House of Seti; and now what do I learn through Ameni?  He is the true son of the dead Mohar, and the foul traitor Paaker is the gardener’s son.  A witch in the Necropolis changed the children.  That is the best news of all that has reached me on this propitious day, for the Mohar’s widow, the noble Setchem, has been brought here, and I should have been obliged to choose between two sentences on her as the mother of the villain who has escaped us.  Either I must have sent her to the quarries, or have had her beheaded before all the people—­In the name of the Gods, what is that?”

They heard a loud cry in a man’s voice, and at the same instant a noise as if some heavy mass had fallen to the ground from a great height.  Rameses and Mena hastened to the window, but started back, for they were met by a cloud of smoke.

“Call the watch!” cried the king.

“Go, you,” exclaimed Mena to Ani.  “I will not leave the king again in danger.”

Ani fled away like an escaped prisoner, but he could not get far, for, before he could descend the stairs to the lower story, they fell in before his very eyes; Katuti, after she had set fire to the interior of the palace, had made them fall by one blow of a hammer.  Ani saw her robe as she herself fled, clenched his fist with rage as he shouted her name, and then, not knowing what he did, rushed headlong through the corridor into which the different royal apartments opened.

The fearful crash of the falling stairs brought the King and Mena also out of the sleeping-room.