About this time, she was twelve years of age, and no one could tell what her beauty would be. Her body, tall and thin, seemed out of place in a family where all the females were plump. She was ripening like some badly-grafted, bastard fruit of foreign, obscure origin. Some of her lineaments were hard and bold, as seen in Macedonia; other traits appeared as if inherited from the depths of Nubia, where womankind is tender and swarthy, for her mother had been a female of inferior race whose pedigree was doubtful. It was surprising to see Cleopatra’s lips, almost thick, under an aquiline nose of rather delicate shape. Her young breasts, very round, small, and widely separated, were crowned with a swelling aureola, thereby showing she was a daughter of the Nile. The little Princess lived in a spacious room, opening on to the vast sea and joined to the Queen’s apartment by a vestibule under a colonnade. Cleopatra passed the hours of the night on a bed of bluish silk, where the skin of her young limbs, already of a dark hue, took on still deeper tints. It came to pass that in the night when—far from her and her thoughts—the events already chronicled in these pages look place, Cleopatra rose long before dawn. She had slept but little and badly, being anxious about her troubles of puberty which she had just experienced, and disturbed by the extreme heat of the atmosphere. Without waking the woman who watched over her slumbers, she softly put her feet to the ground, slipped her golden bangles round her ankles, girded her little brown belly with a row of enormous pearls, and thus accoutred, left her chamber. In the monumental corridor, armed guards were also sound asleep, except one who stood sentinel at the door of the Queen’s room. He fell on his knees and whispered in dire terror, as if he had never before found himself thus struggling in such a conflict of duty and danger: “Princess Cleopatra, I crave thy pardon! I cannot let thee pass!” The lass drew herself up to her full height, knitted her brows violently, and dealt a dull blow on the soldier’s forehead with her clenched fist. “As for thee,” she said in smothered accents, but with ferocious meaning, “I’ll raise a cry of rape, and have thee quartered!” Then, in silence, she entered the Queens chamber. Berenice was asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, her hand hanging down. Over the great crimson couch, a hanging lamp mingled its feeble glare with that of the moon, reflected by the whiteness of the walls. The vague, luminous outlines of the slumbering woman’s supple nudity were thus enwrapped in misty shadow, between these two contrasting lights. Slender Cleopatra sat straight up on the edge of the bed. She took her sister’s face in her two little hands, waking Berenice up by touch and speech. “Why is your lover not with you?” asked Cleopatra. Berenice, startled, opened her lovely eyes. ill-060 “Cleopatra! What are you doing here? What do you want of me?”