She shuddered again as she spoke; but the youth covered her burning hand with kisses, while she gazed affectionately at him and the old man, adding in faltering accents: “Oh, all is well now, and if the gods grant him freedom....” Here Ephraim interrupted her to exclaim in fiery tones: “We are going to the mines this very day. I and my comrades, and my grandfather with us, will put his guards to flight.” “And he shall hear from my lips,” Nun added, “how faithfully Kasana loved him, and that his life will be too short to thank her for such a sacrifice.” His voice failed him--but every trace of suffering had vanished from the countenance of the dying girl, and for a long time she gazed heavenward silently with a happy look. By degrees, however, her smooth brow contracted in an anxious frown, and she gasped in low tones: “Well, all is well... only one thing... my body... unembalmed ... without the sacred amulets....” But the old man answered: “As soon as you have closed your eyes, I will give it, carefully wrapped, to the Phoenician captain now tarrying here, that he may deliver it to your father.” Kasana tried to turn her head toward him to thank him with a loving glance, but she suddenly pressed both hands on her breast, crimson blood welled from her lips, her cheeks varied from livid white to fiery scarlet and, after a brief, painful convulsion, she sank back. Death laid his hand on the loving heart, and her features gained the expression of a child whose mother has forgiven its fault and clasped it to her heart ere it fell asleep. The old man, weeping, closed the dead girl’s eyes. Ephraim, deeply moved, kissed the closed lids, and after a short silence Nun said: “I do not like to enquire about our fate beyond the grave, which Moses himself does not know; but whoever has lived so that his or her memory is tenderly cherished in the souls of loved ones, has, I think, done the utmost possible to secure a future existence. We will remember this dead girl in our most sacred hours. Let us do for her corpse what we promised, and then set forth to show the man for whom Kasana sacrificed what she most valued that we do not love him less than this Egyptian woman.” CHAPTER XXIV. The prisoners of state who were being transported to the mines made slow progress. Even the experienced captain of the guards had never had a more toilsome trip or one more full of annoyances, obstacles, and mishaps. One of his moles, Ephraim, had escaped; he had lost his faithful hounds, and after his troop had been terrified and drenched by a storm such as scarcely occurred in these desert regions once in five years, a second had burst the next evening--the one which brought destruction on Pharaoh’s army--and this had been still more violent and lasting.