“It is a lucky hour in which we first see something new to us, and, by Heracles!  I never before in the whole course of my life saw such villains as these.  I do not regret having gone to see them and talked to them as if I were their equal.  Now, take this torn coat off me, and help me to undress.  Before I go to the feast I will take a hasty plunge in my bath, for I twitch in every limb, I feel as if I had got dirty in their company.

“There lie my clothes and my sandals; strap them on for me, and tell me as you do it how you lured the Roman into the toils.”

Klea could hear every word of this frightful conversation, and clasped her hand over her brow with a shudder, for she found it difficult to believe in the reality of the hideous images that it brought before her mind.  Was she awake or was she a prey to some horrid dream?

She hardly knew, and, indeed, she scarcely understood half of all she heard till the Roman’s name was mentioned.  She felt as if the point of a thin, keen knife was being driven obliquely through her brain from right to left, as it now flashed through her mind that it was against him, against Publius, that the wild beasts, disguised in human form, were directed by Eulaeus, and face to face with this—­the most hideous, the most incredible of horrors—­she suddenly recovered the full use of her senses.  She softly slipped close to that rift in the partition through which the broadest beam of light fell into the room, put her ear close to it, and drank in, with fearful attention, word for word the report made by the eunuch to his iniquitous superior, who frequently interrupted him with remarks, words of approval or a short laugh-drank them in, as a man perishing in the desert drinks the loathsome waters of a salt pool.

And what she heard was indeed well fitted to deprive her of her senses, but the more definite the facts to which the words referred that she could overhear, the more keenly she listened, and the more resolutely she collected her thoughts.  Eulaeus had used her own name to induce the Roman to keep an assignation at midnight in the desert close to the Apis-tombs.  He repeated the words that he had written to this effect on a tile, and which requested Publius to come quite alone to the spot indicated, since she dare not speak with him in the temple.  Finally he was invited to write his answer on the other side of the square of clay.  As Klea heard these words, put into her own mouth by a villain, she could have sobbed aloud heartily with anguish, shame, and rage; but the point now was to keep her ears wide open, for Euergetes asked his odious tool: 

“And what was the Roman’s answer?” Eulaeus must have handed the tile to the king, for he laughed loudly again, and cried out: 

“So he will walk into the trap—­will arrive by half an hour after midnight at the latest, and greets Klea from her sister Irene.  He carries on love-making and abduction wholesale, and buys water-bearers by the pair, like doves in the market or sandals in a shoe maker’s stall.  Only see how the simpleton writes Greek; in these few words there are two mistakes, two regular schoolboys’ blunders.