Stretched at full-length on a couch, and playing with a silky-haired white cat, lay the fair Nefert—­fanned to coolness by a negro-girl—­while her mother Katuti nodded a last farewell to her sister Setchem and to Paaker.

Both had crossed this threshold for the first time for four years, that is since the marriage of Mena with Nefert, and the old enmity seemed now to have given way to heartfelt reconciliation and mutual understanding.

After the pioneer and his mother had disappeared behind the pomegranate shrubs at the entrance of the garden, Katuti turned to her daughter and said: 

“Who would have thought it yesterday?  I believe Paaker loves you still.”

Nefert colored, and exclaimed softly, while she hit the kitten gently with her fan—­

“Mother!”

Katuti smiled.

She was a tall woman of noble demeanor, whose sharp but delicately-cut features and sparkling eyes could still assert some pretensions to feminine beauty.  She wore a long robe, which reached below her ankles; it was of costly material, but dark in color, and of a studied simplicity.  Instead of the ornaments in bracelets, anklets, ear and finger-rings, in necklaces and clasps, which most of the Egyptian ladies—­and indeed her own sister and daughter—­were accustomed to wear, she had only fresh flowers, which were never wanting in the garden of her son-in-law.  Only a plain gold diadem, the badge of her royal descent, always rested, from early morning till late at night, on her high brow—­for a woman too high, though nobly formed—­and confined the long blue-black hair, which fell unbraided down her back, as if its owner contemned the vain labor of arranging it artistically.  But nothing in her exterior was unpremeditated, and the unbejewelled wearer of the diadem, in her plain dress, and with her royal figure, was everywhere sure of being observed, and of finding imitators of her dress, and indeed of her demeanor.

And yet Katuti had long lived in need; aye at the very hour when we first make her acquaintance, she had little of her own, but lived on the estate of her son-in-law as his guest, and as the administrator of his possessions; and before the marriage of her daughter she had lived with her children in a house belonging to her sister Setchem.

She had been the wife of her own brother,

[Marriages between brothers and sisters were allowed in ancient Egypt.  The Ptolemaic princes adopted this, which was contrary to the Macedonian customs.  When Ptolemy ii.  Philadelphus married his sister Arsinoe, it seems to have been thought necessary to excuse it by the relative positions of Venus and Saturn at that period, and the constraining influences of these planets.]

who had died young, and who had squandered the greatest part of the possessions which had been left to him by the new royal family, in an extravagant love of display.

When she became a widow, she was received as a sister with her children by her brother-in-law, Paaker’s father.  She lived in a house of her own, enjoyed the income of an estate assigned to her by the old Mohar, and left to her son-in-law the care of educating her son, a handsome and overbearing lad, with all the claims and pretensions of a youth of distinction.