Crates had really been invited in order to win him over to the Queen’s cause; but charming fair-haired Nico had been commissioned by the conspirators to persuade him to sing Arsinoe’s praises among his professional associates.

The rest of the men present stood in close connection with Arsinoe, and were fellow-conspirators against her husband’s throne and life.  The ladies whom Proclus had invited were all confidants of Arsinoe, the wives and daughters of his other guests.  All were members of the highest class of society, and their manners showed the entire freedom from restraint that existed in the Queen’s immediate circle.  Althea profited by the advantage of being Hermon’s only acquaintance here.  So, when he took his place on the cushion at her side, she greeted him familiarly and cordially, as she had treated him for a long time, wherever they met, and in a low voice told him, sometimes in a kindly tone, sometimes with biting sarcasm, the names and characters of the other guests.

The most aristocratic was Amyntas, who stood highest of all in the Queen’s favour because he had good reason to hate the other Arsinoe, the sister of the King.  His son had been this royal dame’s first husband, and she had deserted him to marry Lysimachus, the aged King of Thrace.

The Rhodian Chrysippus, her leech and trusted counsellor, also possessed great influence over the Queen.

“The noble lady,” whispered Althea, “needs the faithful devotion of every well-disposed subject, for perhaps you have already learned how cruelly the King embitters the life of the mother of his three children.  Many a caprice can be forgiven the suffering Ptolemy, who recently expressed a wish that he could change places with the common workmen whom he saw eating their meal with a good appetite, and who is now tortured by the gout; yet he watches the hapless woman with the jealousy of a tiger, though he himself is openly faithless to her.  What is the Queen to him, since the widow of Lysimachus returned from Thrace—­no, from Cassandrea, Ephesus, and sacred Samothrace, or whatever other places there are which would no longer tolerate the murderess?”

“The King’s sister—­the object of his love?” cried Hermon incredulously.  “She must be forty years old now.”

“Very true,” Althea assented.  “But we are in Egypt, where marriages between brothers and sisters are pleasing to gods and men; and besides, we make our own moral laws here.  Her age!  We women are only as old as we look, and the leeches and tiring women of this beauty of forty practise arts which give her the appearance of twenty-five, yet perhaps the King values her intellect more than her person, and the wisdom of a hundred serpents is certainly united in this woman’s head.  She will make our poor Queen suffer unless real friends guard her from the worst.  The three most trustworthy ones are here:  Amyntas, the leech Chrysippus, and the admirable Proclus.  Let us hope that