“We lament the violence of the conflagration.  You are not well disposed towards Barine.”

“I care no more for her than this couch here cares for the statue of Mercury in the street!” exclaimed Iras, with repellent arrogance.  “There could be no two things in the world more utterly alien than we.  Between the woman whose door stands open, and me, there is nothing in common save our sex.”

“And,” replied Archibius reprovingly, “many a beautiful gift which the gods bestowed upon her as well as upon you.  As for the open door, it was closed yesterday.  The thieves of whom you spoke spoiled her pleasure in granting hospitality.  Antyllus forced himself with noisy impetuosity into her house.  This made her dread still more unprecedented conduct in the future.  In a few hours she will be on the way to Irenia.  I am glad for Caesarion’s sake, and still more for his mother’s, whom we have wronged by forgetting so long for another.”

“To think that we should be forced to do so!” cried Iras excitedly—­” now, at this hour, when every drop of blood, every thought of this poor brain should belong to the Queen!  Yet it could not be avoided.  Cleopatra is returning to us with a heart bleeding from a hundred wounds, and it is terrible to think that a new arrow must strike her as soon as she steps upon her native soil.  You know how she loves the boy, who is the living image of the great man with whom she shared the highest joys of love.  When she learns that he, the son of Caesar, has given his young heart to the cast-off wife of a street orator, a woman whose home attracted men as ripe dates lure birds, it will be—­I know—­like rubbing salt into her fresh wounds.  Alas! and the one sorrow will not be all.  Antony, her husband, also found the way to Barine.  He sought her more than once.  You cannot know it as I do; but Charmian will tell you how sensitive she has become since the flower of her youthful charms—­you don’t perceive it—­is losing one leaf after another.  Jealousy will torture her, and—­I know her well—­perhaps no one will ever render the siren a greater service than I did when I compelled her to leave the city.”

The eyes of Archibius’s clever niece had glittered with such hostile feeling as she spoke that he thought with just anxiety of his dead friend’s daughter.  What did not yet threaten Barine as serious danger Iras had the power to transform into grave peril.

Dion had begged him to maintain strict secrecy; but even had he been permitted to speak, he would not have done so now.  From his knowledge of Iras’s character she might be expected, if she learned that some one had come between her and the friend of her youth, to shrink from no means of spoiling her game.  He remembered the noble Macedonian maiden whom the Queen had begun to favour, and who was hunted to death by Iras’s hostile intrigues.  Few were more clever, and—­if she once loved—­more loyal and devoted, more yielding, pliant, and in happy