“O my royal mistress,” cried Iras, raising her hands beseechingly, “must I again declare that neither the grey hairs which are again brown, nor the few lines which Olympus will soon render invisible, nor whatever else perhaps disturbs you in the image you behold reflected, impairs your beauty?  Unclouded and secure of victory, the spell of your godlike nature—­”

“Cease, cease!” interrupted Cleopatra.  “I know what I know.  No mortal can escape the great eternal laws of Nature.  As surely as birth commences life, everything that exists moves onward to destruction and decay.”

“Yet the gods,” Iras persisted, “give to their works different degrees of existence.  The waterlily blooms but a single day, yet how full of vigour is the sycamore in the garden of the Paneum, which has flourished a thousand years!  Not a petal in the blossoms of your youth has faded, and is it conceivable that there is even the slightest diminution in the love of him who cast away all that man holds dearest because he could not endure to part, even for days or weeks, from the woman whom he worshipped?”

“Would that he had done so!” cried Cleopatra mournfully.  “But are you so sure that it was love which made him follow me?  I am of a different opinion.  True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of man.  I learned this when Caesar was prisoned by a greatly superior force within this very palace, his ships burned, his supply of water cut off.  In him also, in Antony, I was permitted to witness this magnificent spectacle twenty—­what do I say?-a hundred times, so long as he loved me with all the ardour of his fiery soul.  But what happened at Actium?  That shameful flight of the cooing dove after his mate, at which generations yet unborn will point in mockery!  He who does not see more deeply will attribute to the foolish madness of love this wretched forgetfulness of duty, honour, fame, the present and the future; but I, Iras—­and this is the thought which whitens one hair after another, which will speedily destroy the remnant of your mistress’s former beauty by the exhaustion of sleepless nights—­I know better.  It was not love which drew Antony after me, not love that trampled in the dust the radiant image of reckless courage, not love that constrained the demigod to follow the pitiful track of a fugitive woman.”

Here her voice fell, and seizing the girl’s wrist with a painful pressure, she drew her closer to her side and whispered: 

“The goblet of Nektanebus is connected with it.  Ay, tremble!  The powers that emanate from the glittering wonder are as terrible as they are unnatural.  The magic spell exerted by the beaker has transformed the heroic son of Herakles, the more than mortal, into the whimpering coward, the crushed, broken nonentity I found upon the galley’s deck.  You are silent?  Your nimble tongue finds no reply.  How could you have forgotten that you aided me to win the wager which forced Antony