my young lord, I can tell you. To have seen her face to face is no small boast; but that she should take thought of your food and rest, and bid me charge myself with your guidance through this deserted wilderness! why, I cannot remember her so gracious to any one since—well—since the last of them—there, you needn't look so bold at an unveiled woman—I ought never to have brought you here alone!"

It was almost a challenge; but he was busy with his own thoughts, and made no reply. Kalmim, unaccustomed to neglect, attributed his silence, not unnaturally, to exhaustion and fatigue.

"You are weary," said she kindly; "faint, doubtless, from lack of food, and would not confess it to save your life? O, you men, how your pride keeps you up! and why are you only ashamed of those things in which there is no disgrace?"

He compelled himself to answer, though his thoughts were far away.

"I am not ashamed to be faint and athirst. I have ridden two nights and a day, and drank water but once—at the Well of Palms."

"The Well of Palms!" she repeated, her woman's wit marking his abstraction, and assigning to it a woman's cause. "It is the sweetest water in all the land of Shinar. It would taste none the worse when drawn for you by the daughter of Arbaces."

"Ishtar!" he exclaimed, while his whole face brightened. "You have seen her—you know her! Is she not beautiful?"

Kalmim laughed scornfully.

"Beautiful!" she echoed, "with a poor thin face, white as ivory, and solemn as Dagon's yonder, in the fishing-temple! Well, well! then she is beautiful, if you like; and we shall learn next that she is good as well as fair!"

"What do you mean?" he asked, stopping short to look his companion in the face.

Kalmim burst into another laugh.

"I mean nothing, innocent youth!—for strangely innocent you are, though the beard is budding on your chin. And a modest maiden means nothing, I suppose, who frequents the well at which every traveller from the desert must needs halt—who draws water for warriors to drink, and unveils for a stranger she never saw before! Yes, I am unveiled too, I know; but it is different here. The queen's palace has its privileges; and, believe me, they are sometimes sadly abused!"

"Not by one who has just left the light of her presence," answered Sarchedon, angered to the core, though he scarce knew why. "I have never been taught to offend against the majesty of a king's house—to believe a fenced city taken because a bank is cast against it, nor a woman my lawful prize because she lifts her veil."

Next to making love, Kalmim enjoyed quarrelling. To tease, irritate, and perplex a man, was sport only second to that of seeing him at her feet. She clapped her hands mischievously, and exclaimed,

"You are bewitched, my lord! Confess, now. She unveiled to turn her eyes on you before you got to horse and went your way. Is it possible you do not know who and what she is?"

"Good or evil," he answered, "tell me the truth."

"She bears her mother's name," replied Kalmim; "and, like her mother, the blood that flows in her veins is mingled with the fire that glitters in the stars of heaven—a fire affording neither light nor heat, serving only to dazzle and bewilder the children of earth. Arbaces took a wife from that race whom, far off in the northern mountains, the daughters of men bare to the spirits of the stars, tempting them down from their golden thrones with song and spell and all the wiles of grosser earth-born beauty;—deceiving, debasing the Sons of Light, to be by them deceived and deserted in turn, left to sorrow through long years of hopeless solitude and remorse. Old people yet speak of some who had themselves heard the voice of mourning on those mountains in the still sad night—the shriek of woman wailing for the lost lover, in whose bright face she might never look again! Ishtar, the wife of Arbaces, possessed her share of the unearthly influence hereditary in her race. Her husband became a slave. He loved the very print of her feet on the sand. Travelling here from Nineveh, while this great city was building, he halted in the desert, and Ishtar walked out from her tent into the cool starlight night. They say he followed a few paces off. Suddenly she stopped, and stretched her hands towards the sky, like one in distress or pain. Rushing forward to take her in his arms, she vanished out of his very grasp. At sunrise a camel-driver found Arbaces senseless on the plain, and Ishtar was seen no more in tent or palace. But all the love he bore the mother seemed henceforth transferred to the child. Doubtless she has bewitched him too. Beware, my lord—beware! I have heard of men leaving real springs in the desert for shining rivers and broad glittering lakes, that faded always before them into the hot interminable waste. I am but a woman; yet, had I your chance of fortune, I would think twice before I bartered it away for a draught of water and an empty dream!"

He seemed very sad and thoughtful, but they had now reached the temple, and he made no reply. A white-robed priest received the young warrior at its portal with every mark of respect, and ushered him into the cool and lofty building, where bath, raiment, food, and wine, he said, were already prepared, casting a look of intelligence at Kalmim, who answered with as meaning a glance, and one of her brightest smiles. Then dropping her veil, since nobody was there to see her handsome face, she tripped back a good deal faster than she had come to her duties about the person of the Great Queen.