When, ere leaving Gorgias’s house, she bade her friend farewell, she pressed Dion’s hand with affectionate warmth and, as he accompanied her to the carriage, she informed him that, before the first encounter of the troops, Archibius had taken the royal children to his estate of Irenia, where they were at present.

“Rarely has it been my fate to experience a more sorrowful hour than when I beheld the Queen, her heart torn with anguish, bid them fare well.  What fate is impending over the dear ones, who are so worthy of the greatest happiness?  To see the twins and little Alexander recognized and saved from death and insult, and your boy in Barine’s arms, is the last wish which I still cherish.”

On returning to Lochias, Charmian had a long time to wait ere the Queen retired.  She dreaded the mood in which she would leave the banquet.  For months past Cleopatra had returned from the revels of the “Comrades of Death” saddened to tears, or in a blaze of indignation.  How must this last banquet, which began so mournfully and continued with such reckless mirth, affect her?

At last, the second hour after midnight, Cleopatra appeared.

Charmian believed that she must be the sport of some delusion, for the Queen’s eyes which, when she had left her, were full of tears, now sparkled with the radiant light of joy and, as her friend took the crown from her head, she exclaimed: 

“Why did you depart from the banquet so early?  Perhaps it was the last, but I remember no festival more brilliant.  It was like the springtime of my love.  Mark Antony would have touched the heart of a stone statue by that blending of manly daring and humble devotion which no woman can resist.  As in former days, hours shrivelled into moments.  We were again young, once more united.  We were together here at Lochias to-night, and yet in distant years and other places.  The notes of the singers, the melodies of the musicians, the figures executed by the dancers, were lost upon us.  We soared back, hand in hand, to a magic world, and the fairy drama in the realms of the blessed, which passed before us in dazzling splendour and blissful joy, was the dream which I loved best when a child, and at the same time the happiest portion of the life of the Queen of Egypt.

“It began before the gate of the garden of Epicurus, and continued on the river Cydnus.  I again beheld myself on the golden barge, garlanded with wreaths of flowers, reclining on the purple couch with roses strewn around me and beneath my jewelled sandals.  A gentle breeze swelled the silken sails; my female companions raised their clear voices in song to the accompaniment of lutes; the perfumes floating around us were borne by the wind to the shore, conveying the tidings that the bliss believed by mortals to be reserved for the gods alone was drawing near.  And even as his heart and his enraptured senses yielded to my sway, his mind, as he himself confessed, was