Issachar took the stone out of his purse and gave it to Ahiram.
"But why are you so frightened? Have you changed your mind? Won't you go?" the old man said.
"Yes, I will go," Issachar answered.
VI
Poor queen! To give the god hot fomentations when he has stomach-ache and still believe that he is a god is no joke," the old courtier Ay said, laughing.
Tuta, who was very fond of witty remarks, repeated it to Dio in a moment of confidence, and she often recalled it as she looked at Queen Nefertiti.
Mother of six children at the age of twenty-eight, she still looked like a girl: slender girlish waist, bosom only slightly marked, narrow shoulders, collar bones that stood out under the skin, a thin long neck—'like a giraffe's,' she used herself to say jokingly. The round face looked childishly tender under the high bucket-shaped royal tiara, worn low over the forehead so that no hair showed. There was something childishly piteous in the short slightly protruding upper lip; there was an inward brooding look and a fathomless depth of sadness in the big lustreless, rather slanting black eyes under the heavy drooping eyelids.
She seemed to be all on guard, as though listening, spell-bound, to something within herself, motionless as an arrow on the bow string or a chord stretched to the uttermost but not sounding as yet; if it did sound it would break. It was as though she had received a mortal wound and were concealing it from all.