your heedless conduct to pass unpunished, but the next time
you appear unbidden in these apartments, which none may enter without
permission, I shall tell Boges to keep you twelve days in confinement.
Remember this, thoughtless child, and tell our mother, Bartja and I are
coming to visit her. Now give me a kiss. You will not? We shall see,
capricious little one!" And so saying the king sprang towards his
refractory little sister, and seizing both her hands in one of his own,
bent back her charming head with the other and kissed her in spite of
her resistance. She screamed from the violence of his grasp, and ran
away crying to her attendants, who took her back to her apartments.

When Atossa had disappeared, Bartja said; "You were too rough with the
little one, Cambyses. She screamed with pain!"

Once more the king's face clouded, but suppressing the harsh words which
trembled on his lips, he only answered, turning towards the house: "Let
us come to our mother now; she begged me to bring you as soon as you
arrived. The women, as usual, are all impatience. Nitetis told me your
rosy cheeks and fair curls had bewitched the Egyptian women too. I would
advise you to pray betimes to Mithras for eternal youth, and for his
protection against the wrinkles of age!"

"Do you mean to imply by these words that I have no virtues which could
make an old age beautiful?" asked Bartja.

"I explain my words to no one. Come."

"But I ask for an opportunity of proving, that I am inferior to none of
my nation in manly qualities."

"For that matter, the shouts of the Babylonians today will have been
proof enough, that deeds are not wanted from you, in order to win their
admiration."

"Cambyses!"

"Now come! We are just on the eve of a war with the Massagetae; there
you will have a good opportunity of proving what you are worth."

A few minutes later, and Bartja was in the arms of his blind mother. She
had been waiting for her darling's arrival with a beating heart, and
in the joy of hearing his voice once more, and of being able to lay her
hands again on that beloved head, she forgot everything else--even her
first-born son who stood by smiling bitterly, as he watched the rich and
boundless stream of a mother's love flowing out to his younger brother.

Cambyses had been spoiled from his earliest infancy. Every wish had been
fulfilled, every look regarded as a command; and thus he grew up totally
unable to brook contradiction, givin