protect his crown from the hands of the jealous and the envious!"
"Ay! I know! and thy protection is great, oh, beloved of the gods! But is it not meet," she added pensively, "that some one who is near and dear to him should pray to the gods night and day, that their continued blessing may rest upon his head?"
I was beginning to wonder why Queen Maat-kha was suddenly showing such unwonted solicitude for her son; her sweet manners, her fascinations exercised to the full, led me to think that she was playing some hidden game. From the first, the fascinating, exotic queen had deeply interested me. I was always a keen observer and earnest student of human nature, and the one or two incidents in which Maat-kha had been the central figure had already shown me that, in spite of the many thousands of miles that lay between them, in spite of barriers of desert waste and inaccessible heights, this radiant product of an ancient civilisation and her Western twentieth-century sister had the same feminine, capricious, un-understandable heart.
That she was even at this moment playing some little game of her own there could be no doubt; that there was some little feminine cruelty hidden behind her solicitude for her son was clearly shown by her almond-shaped eyes, which had gradually narrowed until they were merely two glittering slits, that again brought back to my mind the two grim guardians of the gates of Kamt.
The same thought had evidently struck Hugh, for he said, with a smile:
"Art already tired of thy future lord, oh, my Queen, that thou turnest thy thoughts to daily and nightly prayers?"
