meeting, was his uncle's foe, and it
was to him that she betrayed the man she loved!

The chink in the tent was ready to show him everything that occurred
within, but he often closed his eyes that he might not behold it. Often,
it is true, the hateful scene held him in thrall by a mysterious spell
and he would fain have torn the walls of the tent asunder, struck the
detested Egyptian to the ground, and shouted into the faithless woman's
face the name of Hosea, coupled with the harshest reproaches.

The fervent passion which had taken possession of him was suddenly
transformed to hate and scorn. He had believed himself to be the
happiest of mortals, and he had suddenly become the most miserable; no
one, he believed, had ever experienced such a fall from the loftiest
heights to the lowest depths.

The nurse had been right. Naught save misery and despair could come to
him from so faithless a woman.

Once he started up to fly, but he again heard the bewitching tones of
her musical laugh, and mysterious powers detained him, forcing him to
listen.

At first the seething blood had throbbed so violently in his ears that
he felt unable to follow the dialogue in the lighted tent. But,
by degrees, he grasped the purport of whole sentences, and now he
understood all that they said, not a word of their further conversation
escaped him, and it was absorbing enough, though it revealed a gulf from
which he shrank shuddering.

Kasana refused the bold suitor many favors for which he pleaded, but
this only impelled him to beseech her more fervently to give herself to
him, and the prize he offered in return was the highest gift of earth,
the place by his side as queen on the throne of Egypt, to which he
aspired. He said this distinctly, but what followed was harder to
understand; for the passionate suitor was in great haste and often
interrupted his hasty sentences to assure Kasana, to whose hands in this
hour he was committing his life and liberty, of his changeless love,
or to soothe her when the boldness of his advances awakened fear and
aversion. But he soon began to speak of the letter whose bearer Ephraim
had been and, after reading it aloud and explaining it, the youth
realized with a slight shudder that he had become an accomplice in the
most criminal of all plots, and for a moment the longing stole over
him to betray the traitors and deliver them into the hand of the mighty
sovereign whose destruction they were plotting. Bu