“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 hours more bewitching, yet even in childhood she had preferred a winding path to a straight one.  It seemed as if her shrewdness scorned to attain the end desired by the simple method lying close at hand.  How willingly his mother and his younger sister Charmian had cared for the slaves and nursed them when they were ill; nay, Charmian had gained in her Nubian maid Aniukis a friend who would have gone to death for her sake!  Cleopatra, too, when a child, had found sincere delight in taking a bouquet to his parents’ sick old housekeeper and sitting by her bedside to shorten the time for her with merry talk.  She had gone to her unasked, while Iras had often been punished because she had made the lives of numerous slaves in her parents’ household still harder by unreasonable harshness.  This trait in her character had roused her uncle’s anxiety and, in after-years, her treatment of her inferiors had been such that he could not number her among the excellent of her sex.  Therefore he was the more joyfully surprised by the loyal, unselfish love with which she devoted herself to the service of the Queen.  Cleopatra had gratified Charmian’s wish to have her niece for an assistant; and Iras, who had never been a loving daughter to her own faithful mother, had served her royal mistress with the utmost tenderness.