“Yes, in a few months the woman had learnt to hold him up high in her arms, for with care and quiet she had grown stronger.  White she always remained and delicate, but she grew younger and more beautiful from day to day; she can hardly have numbered twenty years when I bought her.  What she was called I never heard; nor did we give her any name.  She was ‘the woman,’ and so we called her.

“Eight moons passed by, and then the little Mouse died.  I wept as she did, and as I bent over the little corpse and let my tears have free course, and thought—­now he can never lift up his pretty little finger to you again; then I felt for the first time the woman’s soft hand on my cheek.  She stroked my rough beard as a child might, and with that looked at me so gratefully that I felt as though king Pharaoh had all at once made me a present of both Upper and Lower Egypt.

“When the Mouse was buried she got weaker again, but my mother took good care of her.  I lived with her, like a father with his child.  She was always friendly, but if I approached her, and tried to show her any fondness, she would look at me, and the demon in her eyes drove me back, and I let her alone.

“She grew healthier and stronger and more and more beautiful, so beautiful that I kept her hidden, and was consumed by the longing to make her my wife.  A good housewife she never became, to be sure; her hands were so tender, and she did not even know how to milk the goat.  My mother did that and everything else for her.

“In the daytime she stayed in her hut and worked, for she was very skillful at woman’s work, and wove lace as fine as cobwebs, which my mother sold that she might bring home perfumes with the proceeds.  She was very fond of them, and of flowers too; and Uarda in there takes after her.

“In the evening, when the folk from the other side had left the City of the Dead, she would often walk down the valley here, thoughtful and often looking up at the moon, which she was especially fond of.

“One evening in the winter-time I came home.  It was already dark, and I expected to find her in front of the door.  All at once, about a hundred steps behind old Hekt’s cave, I heard a troop of jackals barking so furiously that I said to myself directly they had attacked a human being, and I knew too who it was, though no one had told me, and the woman could not call or cry out.  Frantic with terror, I tore a firebrand from the hearth and the stake to which the goat was fastened out of the ground, rushed to her help, drove away the beasts, and carried her back senseless to the hut.  My mother helped me, and we called her back to life.  When we were alone, I wept like a child for joy at her escape, and she let me kiss her, and then she became my wife, three years after I had bought her.

“She bore me a little maid, that she herself named Uarda; for she showed us a rose, and then pointed to the child, and we understood her without words.