“She will never require such things from the friend of her childhood,” cried Charmian.  Then, approaching him with both arms extended joyfully, she exclaimed:  “Thus you ought to speak and feel, and therein is the answer to the question which has agitated my soul since yesterday.  Barine’s flight, the favour and disfavour of Cleopatra, Iras, my poor head, which abhors politics, while at this time the Queen needs keen-sighted confidants—­”

“By no means,” her brother interrupted.  “It is for men alone to give counsel in these matters.  Accursed be women’s gossip over their toilet tables.  It has already scattered to the four winds many a well-considered plan of the wisest heads, and an Iras could never be more fatal to statecraft than just at the present moment, had not Fate already uttered the final verdict.”

“Then hence with these scruples,” cried Charmian eagerly; “my doubts are at an end!  As usual, you point out the right path.  I had thought of returning to the country estate we call Irenia—­the abode of peace—­or to our beloved little palace at Kanopus, to spend the years which may still be allotted to me, and return to everything that made my childhood beautiful.  The philosophers, the flowers in the garden, the poets—­even the new Roman ones, of whose works Timagenes sent us such charming specimens—­would enliven the solitude.  The child, the daughter of the man whose love I renounced, and afterwards perhaps her sons and daughters, would fill the place of my own.  As they would have been dear to Leonax, I, too, would have loved them!  This is the guise in which the future has appeared to me in many a quiet hour.  But shall Charmian—­who, when her heart throbbed still more warmly and life lay fair before her, laid her first love upon the altar of sacrifice for her royal playfellow—­abandon Cleopatra in misfortune from mere selfish scruples?  No, no!—­Like you, I too belong—­come what may—­to the Queen.”

She gazed into her brother’s face, sure of his approval but, waving his uplifted hand, he answered gravely:  “No, Charmian!  What I, a man, can assume, might be fatal to you, a woman.  The present is not sweet enough for me to embitter it with wormwood from the future.  And yet you must cast one glance into its gloomy domain, in order to understand me.  You can be silent, and what you now learn will be a secret between us.  Only one thing”—­here he lowered the loud tones of his deep voice—­“only one thing can save her:  the murder of Antony, or an act of shameless treachery which would deliver him into Octavianus’s power.  This is the proposal Timagenes brought.”

“This?” she asked in a hollow tone, her grey head drooping.

“This,” he repeated firmly.  “And if she succumbs to the temptation, she will be faithless to the love which has coursed through her whole life as the Nile flows through the land of her ancestors.  Then, Charmian, stay, stay under any circumstances, cling to her more firmly than ever, for then, then, my sister, she will be more wretched—­ten, a hundred fold more wretched than if Octavianus deprives her of everything, perhaps even life itself.”