The men made a due obeisance and determined to obey; they knew that Boges’ threats were never meant in joke, and fancied something great must be coming to pass, as the stingy eunuch never spent his staters without good reason.

Boges was carried back to the banqueting-hall in the same litter, which had brought Nitetis away.

The king’s wives had left, but the concubines were all standing in their appointed place, singing their monotonous songs, though quite unheard by the uproarious men.

The drinkers had already long forgotten the fainting woman.  The uproar and confusion rose with every fresh wine-cup.  They forgot the dignity of the place where they were assembled, and the presence of their mighty ruler.

They shouted in their drunken joy; warriors embraced one another with a tenderness only excited by wine, here and there a novice was carried away in the arms of a pair of sturdy attendants, while an old hand at the work would seize a wine-jug instead of a goblet, and drain it at a draught amid the cheers of the lookers-on.

The king sat on at the head of the table, pale as death, staring into the wine-cup as if unconscious of what was going on around hint.  But at the sight of his brother his fist clenched.

He would neither speak to him, nor answer his questions.  The longer he sat there gazing into vacancy, the firmer became his conviction that Nitetis had deceived him,—­that she had pretended to love him while her heart really belonged to Bartja.  How shamefully they had made sport of him!  How deeply rooted must have been the faithlessness of this clever hypocrite, if the mere news that his brother loved some one else could not only destroy all her powers of dissimulation, but actually deprive her of consciousness!

When Nitetis left the hall, Otanes, the father of Phaedime had called out:  “The Egyptian women seem to take great interest in the love-affairs of their brothers-in-law.  The Persian women are not so generous with their feelings; they keep them for their husbands.”

Cambyses was too proud to let it be seen that he had heard these words; like the ostrich, he feigned deafness and blindness in order not to seem aware of the looks and murmurs of his guests, which all went to prove that he had been deceived.

Bartja could have had no share in her perfidy; she had loved this handsome youth, and perhaps all the more because she had not been able to hope for a return of her love.  If he had had the slightest suspicion of his brother, he would have killed him on the spot.  Bartja was certainly innocent of any share in the deception and in his brother’s misery, but still he was the cause of all; so the old grudge, which had only just been allowed to slumber, woke again; and, as a relapse is always more dangerous than the original illness, the newly-roused anger was more violent than what he had formerly felt.

He thought and thought, but he could not devise a fitting punishment for this false woman.  Her death would not content his vengeance, she must suffer something worse than mere death!