meat had been
tasted in his house.

The physician Nebsecht, himself eating nothing but a piece of bread,
looked on at the feasters. They tore the meat from the bones, and the
soldier, especially, devoured the costly and unwonted meal like some
ravenous animal. He could be heard chewing like a horse in the manger,
and a feeling of disgust filled the physician's soul.

"Sensual beings," he murmured to himself, "animals with consciousness!
And yet human beings. Strange! They languish bound in the fetters of the
world of sense, and yet how much more ardently they desire that which
transcends sense than we--how much more real it is to them than to us!"

"Will you have some meat?" cried the soldier, who had remarked that
Nebsecht's lips moved, and tearing a piece of meat from the bone of the
joint he was devouring, he held it out to the physician. Nebsecht shrank
back; the greedy look, the glistening teeth, the dark, rough features of
the man terrified him. And he thought of the white and fragile form of
the sick girl lying within on the mat, and a question escaped his lips.

"Is the maiden, is Uarda, your own child?" he said.

The soldier struck himself on the breast. "So sure as the king Rameses is
the son of Seti," he answered. The men had finished their meal, and the
flat cakes of bread which the wife of the paraschites gave them, and on
which they had wiped their hands from the fat, were consumed, when the
soldier, in whose slow brain the physician's question still lingered,
said, sighing deeply:

"Her mother was a stranger; she laid the white dove in the raven's nest."

"Of what country was your wife a native?" asked the physician.

"That I do not know," replied the soldier.

"Did you never enquire about the family of your own wife?"

"Certainly I did: but how could she have answered me? But it is a long
and strange story."

"Relate it to me," said Nebsecht, "the night is long, and I like
listening better than talking. But first I will see after our patient."

When the physician had satisfied himself that Uarda was sleeping quietly
and breathing regularly, he seated himself again by the paraschites and
his son, and the soldier began:

"It all happened long ago. King Seti still lived, but Rameses already
reigned in his stead, when I came home from the north. They had sent me
to the workmen, who were building the fortifications in Zoan, the town of
Rameses.--[The Rameses of the Bible. Exodus i. ii.]--I was s