r the apparently careless arrangement of these various objects
there reigned a peculiar charm, an indescribably fascinating something.

Stretched at full-length on a couch, and playing with a silky-haired
white cat, lay the fair Nefert--fanned to coolness by a negro-girl--while
her mother Katuti nodded a last farewell to her sister Setchem and to
Paaker.

Both had crossed this threshold for the first time for four years, that
is since the marriage of Mena with Nefert, and the old enmity seemed now
to have given way to heartfelt reconciliation and mutual understanding.

After the pioneer and his mother had disappeared behind the pomegranate
shrubs at the entrance of the garden, Katuti turned to her daughter and
said:

"Who would have thought it yesterday? I believe Paaker loves you still."

Nefert colored, and exclaimed softly, while she hit the kitten gently
with her fan--

"Mother!"

Katuti smiled.

She was a tall woman of noble demeanor, whose sharp but delicately-cut
features and sparkling eyes could still assert some pretensions to
feminine beauty. She wore a long robe, which reached below her ankles; it
was of costly material, but dark in color, and of a studied simplicity.
Instead of the ornaments in bracelets, anklets, ear and finger-rings, in
necklaces and clasps, which most of the Egyptian ladies--and indeed her
own sister and daughter--were accustomed to wear, she had only fresh
flowers, which were never wanting in the garden of her son-in-law. Only a
plain gold diadem, the badge of her royal descent, always rested, from
early morning till late at night, on her high brow--for a woman too high,
though nobly formed--and confined the long blue-black hair, which fell
unbraided down her back, as if its owner contemned the vain labor of
arranging it artistically. But nothing in her exterior was
unpremeditated, and the unbejewelled wearer of the diadem, in her plain
dress, and with her royal figure, was everywhere sure of being observed,
and of finding imitators of her dress, and indeed of her demeanor.

And yet Katuti had long lived in need; aye at the very hour when we first
make her acquaintance, she had little of her own, but lived on the estate
of her son-in-law as his guest, and as the administrator of his
possessions; and before the marriage of her daughter she had lived with
her children in a house belonging to her sister Setchem.

She had been the wife of her own brother,

[Marriages between