“I do not understand.  Will it please you to be more plain?” I said faintly.

“I will be more plain, Count Shabaka, more plain than you have been with me.  Since we speak together for the last time it is well that I should be plain.  Hear me.  When first you returned from the East, in yonder hall you told us of certain things that happened to you there.  Then the dwarf your servant took up the tale.  He said that he gave my name to the Great King.  I was wroth as well I might be, but even when I prayed that he should be scourged, you did not deny that it was he who gave my name to the King, although Pharaoh yonder said that if you had spoken the name it would have been another matter.”

“I had no time,” I answered, “for just then the messengers came from Idernes and afterwards when I sought you you were gone.”

“Had you then no time,” she asked coldly, “beneath the palms in the garden of the palace when we were affianced?  Oh! there was time in plenty but it did not please you to tell me that you had bought safety and great gifts at the price of the honour of the Lady of Egypt whose love you stole.”

“You do not understand!” I exclaimed wildly.

“Forgive me, Shabaka, but I understand very well indeed, since from your own words I learned at the feast given to Idernes that ’the name of Amada’ slipped your lips by chance and thus came to the ears of the Great King.”

“The tale that Idernes and his captain told was false, Lady, and for it Bes and I took their lives with our own hands.”

“It had perhaps been better, Shabaka, if you had kept them living that they might confess that it was false.  But doubtless you thought them safer dead, since dead men cannot speak, and for this reason challenged them to single combat.”

I gasped and could not answer for my mind seemed to leave me, and she went on in a gentler voice,

“I do not wish to speak angrily to you, my cousin Shabaka, especially when you have just wrought such great deeds for Egypt.  Moreover by the law I serve I may speak angrily to no man.  Know then that on learning the truth, since I could love none but you according to the flesh and therefore can never give myself in marriage to another, I sought refuge in the arms of the goddess whom for your sake I had deserted.  She was pleased to receive me, forgetting my treason.  On this very day for the second time I took the oaths which may no more be broken, and that I may dwell where I shall never see you more, Pharaoh here has been pleased, at my request to name me high priestess and prophetess of Isis and to appoint me as a dwelling-place her temple at Amada where I was born far away in Upper Egypt.  Now all is said and done, so farewell.”

“All is not said and done,” I broke out in fury.  “Pharaoh, I ask your leave to tell the full story of this business of the naming of the lady Amada to the King of kings, and that in the presence of the dwarf Bes.  Even a slave is allowed to set out his tale before judgment is passed upon him.”