and partly by coaxing and partly by insistence strove to induce him to quit the sheltering gown and to turn to her; but although the lady, his wet-nurse, seconded her with kind words of encouragement, the terrified child began to cry, and resisted his mother’s caresses with more and more vehemence the more passionately she tried to attract and conciliate him.  At last the nurse lifted him up, and was about to hand him to his mother, but the wilful little boy cried more than before, and throwing his arms convulsively round his nurse’s neck he broke into loud cries.

In the midst of this rather unbecoming struggle of the mother against the child’s obstinacy, the clatter of wheels and of horses’ hoofs rang through the court-yard of the palace, and hardly had the sound reached the queen’s ears than she turned away from the screaming child, hurried to the parapet of the roof, and called out to Zoe: 

“Publius Scipio is here; it is high time that I should dress for the banquet.  Will that naughty child not listen to me at all?  Take him away, Praxinoa, and understand distinctly that I am much dissatisfied with you.  You estrange my own child from me to curry favor with the future king.  That is base, or else it proves that you have no tact, and are incompetent for the office entrusted to you.  The office of wet-nurse you duly fulfilled, but I shall now look out for another attendant for the boy.  Do not answer me! no tears!  I have had enough of that with the child’s screaming.”  With these words, spoken loudly and passionately, she turned her back on Praxinoa—­the wife of a distinguished Macedonian noble, who stood as if petrified—­and retired into her tent, where branched lamps had just been placed on little tables of elegant workmanship.  Like all the other furniture in the queen’s dressing-tent these were made of gleaming ivory, standing out in fine relief from the tent-cloth which was sky-blue woven with silver lilies and ears of corn, and from the tiger-skins which covered all the cushions, while white woollen carpets, bordered with a waving scroll in blue, were spread on the ground.

The queen threw herself on a seat in front of her dressing-table, and sat staring at herself in a mirror, as if she now saw her face and her abundant, reddish-fair hair for the first time; then she said, half turning to Zoe and half to her favorite Athenian waiting-maid, who stood behind her with her other women: 

“It was folly to dye my dark hair light; but now it may remain so, for Publius Scipio, who has no suspicion of our arts, thought this color pretty and uncommon, and never will know its origin.  That Egyptian headdress with the vulture’s head which the king likes best to see me in, the young Greek Lysias and the Roman too, call barbaric, and so every one must call it who is not interested in the Egyptians.  But to-night we are only ourselves, so I will wear the chaplet of golden corn with sapphire grapes.  Do you think, Zoe, that with that I could