of
her children.

At this she was deeply offended, for she ventured to say that her
relatives could never, with all their gifts, compensate for the insults
they heaped upon her; and thus taught them by experience that we quarrel
with no one more readily than with the benefactor whom we can never
repay for all the good he bestows on us.

Nevertheless, when her brother-in-law asked the hand of her daughter for
his son, she willingly gave her consent.

Nefert and Paaker had grown up together, and by this union she foresaw
that she could secure her own future and that of her children.

Shortly after the death of the Mohar, the charioteer Mena had proposed
for Nefert's hand, but would have been refused if the king himself had
not supported the suit of his favorite officer. After the wedding, she
retired with Nefert to Mena's house, and undertook, while he was at
the war, to manage his great estates, which however had been greatly
burthened with debt by his father.

Fate put the means into her hands of indemnifying herself and her
children for many past privations, and she availed herself of them
to gratify her innate desire to be esteemed and admired; to obtain
admission for her son, splendidly equipped, into a company of
chariot-warriors of the highest class; and to surround her daughter with
princely magnificence.

When the Regent, who had been a friend of her late husband, removed into
the palace of the Pharaohs, he made her advances, and the clever and
decided woman knew how to make herself at first agreeable, and finally
indispensable, to the vacillating man.

She availed herself of the circumstance that she, as well as he, was
descended from the old royal house to pique his ambition, and to open to
him a view, which even to think of, he would have considered forbidden
as a crime, before he became intimate with her.

Ani's suit for the hand of the princess Bent-Anat was Katuti's work. She
hoped that the Pharoah would refuse, and personally offend the Regent,
and so make him more inclined to tread the dangerous road which she was
endeavoring to smooth for him. The dwarf Nemu was her pliant tool.

She had not initiated him into her projects by any words; he however
gave utterance to every impulse of her mind in free language, which was
punished only with blows from a fan, and, only the day before, had been
so audacious as to say that if the Pharoah were called Ani instead of
Rameses, Katuti would be not a quee