e. He
sought her more than once. You cannot know it as I do; but Charmian will
tell you how sensitive she has become since the flower of her youthful
charms--you don't perceive it--is losing one leaf after another.
Jealousy will torture her, and--I know her well--perhaps no one will
ever render the siren a greater service than I did when I compelled her
to leave the city."

The eyes of Archibius's clever niece had glittered with such hostile
feeling as she spoke that he thought with just anxiety of his dead
friend's daughter. What did not yet threaten Barine as serious danger
Iras had the power to transform into grave peril.

Dion had begged him to maintain strict secrecy; but even had he been
permitted to speak, he would not have done so now. From his knowledge of
Iras's character she might be expected, if she learned that some one had
come between her and the friend of her youth, to shrink from no means
of spoiling her game. He remembered the noble Macedonian maiden whom the
Queen had begun to favour, and who was hunted to death by Iras's hostile
intrigues. Few were more clever, and--if she once loved--more loyal and
devoted, more yielding, pliant, and in happy hours more bewitching, yet
even in childhood she had preferred a winding path to a straight one.
It seemed as if her shrewdness scorned to attain the end desired by
the simple method lying close at hand. How willingly his mother and his
younger sister Charmian had cared for the slaves and nursed them when
they were ill; nay, Charmian had gained in her Nubian maid Aniukis a
friend who would have gone to death for her sake! Cleopatra, too, when
a child, had found sincere delight in taking a bouquet to his parents'
sick old housekeeper and sitting by her bedside to shorten the time for
her with merry talk. She had gone to her unasked, while Iras had often
been punished because she had made the lives of numerous slaves in her
parents' household still harder by unreasonable harshness. This trait
in her character had roused her uncle's anxiety and, in after-years, her
treatment of her inferiors had been such that he could not number her
among the excellent of her sex. Therefore he was the more joyfully
surprised by the loyal, unselfish love with which she devoted herself
to the service of the Queen. Cleopatra had gratified Charmian's wish to
have her niece for an assistant; and Iras, who had never been a loving
daughter to her own faithful mother, had served her roy