Here Archibius interrupted her with the remark that he remembered perfectly how, after the song, Antony had addressed her at the same time as the Queen, and Cleopatra lacked no feminine weakness.

“Jealousy?” asked Barine, in astonishment.  “I was not presumptuous enough to admit it.  I secretly feared that Alexas, the brother of Philostratus, had prejudiced her.  He is as ill-disposed towards me as the man who was my husband.  But everything connected with those two is so base and shameful that I will not allow it to cloud this pleasant hour.  Yet the fear that Alexas might have slandered me to the Queen is not groundless.

“He is as shrewd as his brother, and through Antony, into whose favour he ingratiated himself, is always in communication with Cleopatra.  He went to the war with him.”

“I learned that too late, and am utterly powerless against Antony,” replied Archibius.

“But was it not natural that I should fear he had prejudiced the Queen?” asked Barine.  “At any rate, I imagined that I detected a hostile expression in her eyes, and it repelled me, though at first I had been so strongly attracted towards her.”

“And had not that other stepped between you, you could not have turned from her again!” said Archibius.  “The first time I saw her I was but a mere boy, and she—­as I have already said—­a child eight years old.”

Barine nodded gratefully to Archibius, brought the distaff to her mother, poured water into the wine in the mixing vessel, and after at first leaning comfortably back among the cushions, she soon bent forward in a listening attitude, with her elbow propped on her knee, and her chin supported by her hand.  Berenike drew the flax from the distaff, at first slowly, then faster and faster.

“You know my country-house in the Kanopus,” the guest began.  “It was originally a small summer palace belonging to the royal family, and underwent little change after we moved into it.  Even the garden is unaltered.  It was full of shady old trees.  Olympus, the leech, had chosen this place, that my father might complete within its walls the work of education entrusted to him.  You shall hear the story.  At that time Alexandria was in a state of turmoil, for Rome had not recognized the King, and ruled over us like Fate, though it had not acknowledged the will by which the miserable Alexander bequeathed Egypt to him like a field or a slave.

“The King of Egypt, who called himself ‘the new Dionysus,’ was a weak man, whose birth did not give him the full right to the sovereignty.  You know that the people called him the ‘fluteplayer.’  He really had no greater pleasure than to hear music and listen to his own performances.  He played by no means badly on more than one instrument, and, moreover, as a reveller did honour to the other name.  Whoever kept sober at the festival of Dionysus, whose incarnate second self he regarded himself, incurred his deepest displeasure.