s horse in order to avoid meeting her eyes.

"Then may the gods take him into their keeping!" exclaimed Sappho,
clasping her husband's hand, and bursting into tears, which she could not
keep back. Bartja looked down and saw his usually trustful wife in tears.
He felt sadder than he had ever felt before. Stooping down lovingly from
his saddle, he put his strong arm round her waist, lifted her up to him,
and as she stood supporting herself on his foot in the stirrup, pressed
her to his heart, as if for a long last farewell. He then let her safely
and gently to the ground, took his child up to him on the saddle, kissed
and fondled the little creature, and told her laughingly to make her
mother very happy while he was away, exchanged some warm words of
farewell with Rhodopis, and then, spurring his horse till the creature
reared, dashed through the gateway of the Pharaohs' palace, with
Prexaspes at his side.

When the sound of the horses' hoofs had died away in the distance, Sappho
laid her head on her grandmother's shoulder and wept uncontrollably.
Rhodopis remonstrated and blamed, but all in vain, she could not stop her
tears.

CHAPTER XV.

On the morning after the trial of the bow, Cambyses was seized by such a
violent attack of his old illness, that he was forced to keep his room
for two days and nights, ill in mind and body; at times raging like a
madman, at others weak and powerless as a little child.

On the third day he recovered consciousness and remembered the awful
charge he had laid on Prexaspes, and that it was only too possible he
might have executed it already. At this thought he trembled, as he had
never trembled in his life before. He sent at once for the envoy's eldest
son, who was one of the royal cup-bearers. The boy said his father had
left Memphis, without taking leave of his family. He then sent for
Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges, knowing how tenderly they loved Bartja, and
enquired after their friend. On hearing from them that he was at Sais, he
sent the three youths thither at once, charging them, if they met
Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis without delay. This
haste and the king's strange behavior were quite incomprehensible to the
young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on their journey with all
speed, fearing that something must be wrong.

Cambyses, meanwhile, was miserably restless, inwardly cursed his habit of
drinking and tasted no wine the whole of that clay. See