“This is the drink,” she said, giving the phial to Paaker.  “Pour half into water, and offer it to the lady.  If it does not succeed at first, it is certain the second time.  A child may drink the water and it will not hurt him, or if an old man takes it, it makes him gay.  Ah, I know the taste of it!” and she moistened her lips with the white fluid.  “It can hurt no one, but I will take no more of it, or old Hekt will be tormented with love and longing for thee; and that would ill please the rich young lord, ha! ha!  If the drink is in vain I am paid enough, if it takes effect thou shalt bring me three more gold rings; and thou wilt return, I know it well.”

Paaker had listened motionless to the old woman, and siezed the flask eagerly, as if bidding defiance to some adversary; he put it in his money bag, threw a few more rings at the feet of the witch, and once more hastily demanded a bowl of Nile-water.

“Is my lord in such a hurry?” muttered the old woman, once more going into the cave.  “He asks if I know him? him certainly I do? but the darling? who can it be hereabouts? perhaps little Uarda at the paraschites yonder.  She is pretty enough; but she is lying on a mat, run over and dying.  We must see what my lord means.  He would have pleased me well enough, if I were young; but he will reach the goal, for he is resolute and spares no one.”

While she muttered these and similar words, she filled a graceful cup of glazed earthenware with filtered Nile-water, which she poured out of a large porous clay jar, and laid a laurel leaf, on which was scratched two hearts linked together by seven strokes, on the surface of the limpid fluid.  Then she stepped out into the air again.

As Paaker took the vessel from her looked at the laurel leaf, she said: 

“This indeed binds hearts; three is the husband, four is the wife, seven is the chachach, charcharachacha.”—­[This jargon is fund in a magic-papyrus at Berlin.]

The old woman sang this spell not without skill; but the Mohar appeared not to listen to her jargon.  He descended carefully into the valley, and directed his steps to the resting place of the wife of Mena.

By the side of a rock, which hill him from Nefert, he paused, set the cup on a flat block of stone, and drew the flask with the philter out of his girdle.

His fingers trembled, but a thousand voices seemed to surge up and cry: 

“Take it!—­do it!—­put in the drink!—­now or never.”  He felt like a solitary traveller, who finds on his road the last will of a relation whose possessions he had hoped for, but which disinherits him.  Shall he surrender it to the judge, or shall he destroy it.

Paaker was not merely outwardly devout; hitherto he had in everything intended to act according to the prescriptions of the religion of his fathers.  Adultery was a heavy sin; but had not he an older right to Nefert than the king’s charioteer?