The priest bowed low before his lord again, and then, murmuring words of praise and thankfulness, went quickly from the room to do his thrice-welcome errand. For a few minutes the silence of the splendid death-chamber was unbroken save by the faint sound of the dying Inca’s breathing. Then the thick woollen curtains which covered the door were drawn aside, and a woman, tall and of imperial carriage, and still fair to look upon, with the relics of a beauty that had once been peerless, came into the room followed by a stalwart, splendidly robed youth who could have been none other than her son. As they entered the Inca opened his eyes, and with the hand that was lying outside the coverings of the couch he beckoned to them to come near. They went and stood by his bedside, and he told them in the brief words of a man who knows that he has not many words to waste that which he had summoned them to hear. For a moment they stood silent and motionless, looking each at the other and then at the Inca who lay watching them and waiting for them to speak. Then suddenly a deep flush of anger burnt in the woman’s cheeks and a fierce light leapt into her eyes, and with a swift movement she laid her hands over the dying Inca’s mouth and nose and pressed his lips and nostrils tightly together. His eyes opened widely into a stare of horror. There was a brief, convulsive movement under the covering, and then the glaze of death dimmed the staring eyes, and when the high priest came back, followed by the chief princes and nobles of Quito, Zaïma the Queen was lying wailing over the dead body of her husband and her Lord, and Atahuallpa, Inca of the North, was cowering by the bedside with his face buried in his hands and his body trembling and shaking with sobs. At the same moment, far away to the northward and westward, a man was drawing with his sword-point a line along the sandy beach of the desolate island of Gallo, and in the years to come, though neither he nor the son of the murderess knew it, the steel of that same sword was destined to cleave its way to the heart of the great empire which Huayna-Capac would have made impregnable but for the hand of his queen which robbed him of the last half-hour of his life. CHAPTER II. THE DOOM OF THE ANCIENT LAW Ullomaya and those who followed him stopped suddenly on the threshold of what was now in truth the death-chamber of the Inca, and bent their heads and remained for a moment in respectful silence. Then the High Priest of the Sun went forward to the bedside and spoke to the prostrate woman, saying-- “Alas, I see we come too late, for our Lord is already standing in the bright courts of the Mansions of the Sun, and yet not too late, since before he departed he spoke the words of wisdom and comfort for his people. Is that not so, O Queen?”