Tachot’s tears flowed fast.  These words were a confirmation of what they had been trying to hide from her:  she was to lose her dear father soon.

After she had made this dreadful certainty clear to her own mind, and discovered that it was in vain to beg her attendants to carry her to her dying father, she left off listening to the courtiers below, and began looking at the sistrum which Bartja himself had put into her hand, and which she had brought on to the balcony with her, as if seeking comfort there.  And she found what she sought; for it seemed to her as if the sound of its sacred rings bore her away into a smiling, sunny landscape.

That faintness which so often comes over people in decline, had seized her and was sweetening her last hours with pleasant dreams.

The female slaves, who stood round to fan away the flies, said afterwards that Tachot had never looked so lovely.

She had lain about an hour in this state, when her breathing became more difficult, a slight cough made her breast heave, and the bright red blood trickled down from her lips on to her white robe.  She awoke, and looked surprised and disappointed on seeing the faces round her.  The sight of her mother, however, who came on to the veranda at that moment, brought a smile to her face, and she said, “O mother, I have had such a beautiful dream.”

“Then our visit to the temple has done my dear child good?” asked the queen, trembling at the sight of the blood on the sick girl’s lips.

“Oh, yes, mother, so much! for I saw him again.”  Ladice’s glance at the attendants seemed to ask “Has your poor mistress lost her senses?” Tachot understood the look and said, evidently speaking with great difficulty:  “You think I am wandering, mother.  No, indeed, I really saw and spoke to him.  He gave me my sistrum again, and said he was my friend, and then he took my lotus-bud and vanished.  Don’t look so distressed and surprised, mother.  What I say is really true; it is no dream.—­There, you hear, Tentrut saw him too.  He must have come to Sais for my sake, and so the child-oracle in the temple-court did not deceive me, after all.  And now I don’t feel anything more of my illness; I dreamt I was lying in a field of blooming poppies, as red as the blood of the young lambs that are offered in sacrifice; Bartja was sitting by my side, and Nitetis was kneeling close to us and playing wonderful songs on a Nabla made of ivory.  And there was such a lovely sound in the air that I felt as if Horus, the beautiful god of morning, spring, and the resurrection, was kissing me.  Yes, mother, I tell you he is coming soon, and when I am well, then—­then—­ah, mother what is this? . . .  I am dying!”

Ladice knelt down by her child’s bed and pressed her lips in burning kisses on the girl’s eyes as they grew dim in death.

An hour later she was standing by another bedside—­her dying husband’s.

Severe suffering had disfigured the king’s features, the cold perspiration was standing on his forehead, and his hands grasped the golden lions on the arms of the deep-seated invalid chair in which he was resting, almost convulsively.