s agonizing death filled her heart.

All that Mark Antony had been to her in the heyday of life, all their
mutual experiences, all that each had received from the other, had
returned to her memory in clear and vivid hues during the banquet which
had closed a few hours ago. Now these scenes, condensed into a narrow
compass, again passed before her mental vision, but only to reveal more
distinctly the depth of misery of this hour. At last anguish forced even
the clearest memories into oblivion: she saw nothing save the tortures of
her lover; her brain, still active, revealed solely the gulf at her feet,
and the tomb which yawned not only for Antony, but for herself.

Unable to think of the happiness enjoyed in the past or to hope for it in
the future, she gave herself up to uncontrolled despair, and no woman of
the people could have yielded more absolutely to the consuming grief
which rent her heart, or expressed it in wilder, more frantic language,
than did this great Queen, this woman who as a child had been so
sensitive to the slightest suffering, and whose after-life had certainly
not taught her to bear sorrow with patience. After Charmian, at the dying
man's request, had given him some wine, he found strength to speak
coherently, instead of moaning and sighing.

He tenderly urged Cleopatra to secure her own safety, if it could be done
without dishonour, and mentioned Proculejus as the man most worthy of her
confidence among the friends of Octavianus. Then he entreated her not to
mourn for him, but to consider him happy; for he had enjoyed the richest
favours of Fortune. He owed his brightest hours to her love; but he had
also been the first and most powerful man on earth. Now he was dying in
the arms of Love, honourable as a Roman who succumbed to Romans.

In this conviction he died after a short struggle.

Cleopatra had watched his last breath, closed his eyes, and then thrown
herself tearlessly on her lover's body. At last she fainted, and lay
unconscious with her head upon his marble breast.

The private secretary had witnessed all this, and then returned with
tearful eyes to the second story. There he met Gorgias, who had climbed
the scaffolding, and told him what he had seen and heard from the stairs.
But his story was scarcely ended when a carriage stopped at the Corner of
the Muses and an aristocratic Roman alighted. This was the very
Proculejus whom the dying Antony had recommended to the woman he loved a