Under the blazing lights the two stood together, and the body of the dead girl lay at their feet. The Queen pointed to it. Her arm and hand were of faultless beauty. She was thirty-eight, but with all the bloom and fullness of just-ripened womanhood. Years had not set one streak of alloy in the treasure of her golden hair, or clouded the azure of her eyes, or done more than perfect in her the natural weapons of the sorceress. She might have been the Decurion’s sister, so like he was to her in grace and Grecian fairness. She fixed him with her eyes. “I marked thee, Decurion,” she said--“and not for the first time. Thy looks defied me, thine eyes condemned. What--did you dare! And thy lip curled when Antony yielded me the cup. Answer why, so thou wouldst not----” He stayed her fearlessly: “Because I love him.” “What, then?” she said, wondering. “Could he not see, as we all saw,” he answered, “that thou hadst poisoned it? For his wit’s sake I would have had him comprehend; for his nobility’s sake I would have had him refuse thee the cup; for his soul’s sake I would have had him drink from it himself, and die, and be free.” “Free? From what?” “From his thrall.” “What callest thou that?” “The Curse of Antony.” “Meaning Cleopatra?” “Meaning thee, O Queen!” She laughed. She did not strike his mouth, as was her first mad impulse. “Darest thou?” she breathed again; then stared into his eyes in pure amazement. Was he not the first man who had ever spoken to her thus? “Well, thou lovest him,” she said presently, with a deep sigh--“and I, too, in my poor way. It shall be a contest of loves between us.” She gazed a moment unmoved on the little distorted body at her feet, glanced mockingly at the Decurion, and, turning, left him lost in wonderment. He never saw her again until near the end. She was occupied in the meanwhile in building herself an unsurpassable mausoleum, and in testing on the bodies of slaves the effects of various poisons. Foreseeing the worst, and prepared for it, she would yet woo Death like a voluptuary, and borrow rapture of his embrace. Yet so far the test had failed her; and not from any inhumanity; for indeed she would have kissed in ecstasy that slave who suffered nothing in obliging her. But one and all they would persist most perversely in dying in extreme agony. And then one day she sent for the Decurion Dentatus, who, in the thick of the general treachery, was among the few noble who stood by their leader. It was when Octavius was at Pelusium, and the fate of Alexandria appeared sealed.