ended
their holiday to the dreary camp at Masaarah. Kenkenes climbed up to
his retreat and remained there only a little time. The unhewn rock
mocked him.

He descended through the gorge and found that the Hebrews were but
nominally idle. A rope-walk had been constructed and the men were
twisting cables of tough fiber. The Egyptians lounged in the long
shadows of the late afternoon and directed the work with no effort and
little concern. The young sculptor overlooked the scene as long as it
interested him and continued down the valley toward the Nile.

Presently a little company of Hebrew children approached, their bare
feet making velvety sounds in the silence of the ravine. Each balanced
a skin of water on his head. The little line obsequiously curved
outward to let the nobleman pass, and one by one the sturdy children
turned their luminous eyes up to him, some with a flash of white teeth,
some with a downward dip of a bashful head. One of them disengaged a
hand from his burden and swept a tangle of moist black curls away from
his eyes. The sun of the desert had not penetrated that pretty thatch
and the forehead was as fair as a lotus flower.

Kenkenes caught himself looking sharply at each face as he passed, for
it contained somewhat of that for which he sought. As he walked along
looking after them he became aware that some one was near him, He
turned his head and stopped in his tracks.

He confronted his idea embodied--Athor, the Golden!

It was an Israelitish maiden, barely sixteen years old, but in all his
life he had never looked upon such beauty. He had gazed with pleased
eyes on the slender blush-tinted throats and wrists of the Egyptian
beauties, but never had he beheld such whiteness of flesh as this. He
had sunk himself in the depths of the dusky, amorous eyes of high-born
women of Memphis, but here were fathomless profundities of azure that
abashed the heavens. He had been very near to loveliest hair of Egypt,
so close that its odorous filaments had blown across his face and his
artist senses had been caught and tangled in its ebon sorcery. But
down each side this broad brow was a rippling wave of gold, over each
shoulder a heavy braid of gold that fell, straightened by its own
weight, a span below the waist. The winds of the desert had roughened
it and the bright threads made a nimbus about the head. Its glory
overreached his senses and besieged his soul. Here was not witchery,
but e