"Why fallen in love?" she asked, smiling, too.
"Because when girls are in love they grow particularly pretty."
Dio shook her head, blushed and bending quickly down, caught the queen's hand and began kissing it eagerly, as though she were kissing him through her.
Suddenly she felt the queen's hand tremble. Raising her eyes and seeing that the queen was looking at the door, she, too, looked in the same direction. Merira, son of Nehtaneb, the high priest of the god Aton, was standing in the doorway.
Dio had been struck by his face at the festival of the Sun and since then she often looked at him wondering whether she felt repelled or attracted by him.
He somewhat resembled Tammuzadad: there was the same stony heaviness about their faces; but there had been something childlike and piteous in the Babylonian's face, while Merira looked hopelessly grown up. There was a stony heaviness in the low overhanging brows, in the eyes immoveably intent and yet, as it were, unseeing, the wide cheekbones, the firmly set jaw and the tightly closed lips that seemed sealed with bitterness and were always ready to jeer, though they could never smile.
"He that increases knowledge increases sorrow," Dio recalled Tammuzadad's words as she looked at that face. "To know all is to despise all," it seemed to say, "not to curse, but merely to despise in secret, to spew out of one's mouth." If a very courageous man firmly determined on suicide had drunk poison and then calmly awaited death, his face would wear the same expression.
Merira came of a very old family of the Heliopolis priests of the Sun. He had once been the favourite pupil of Ptamose and an ardent devotee of Amon; but he gave up the old faith and worshipped Aton. The king was very fond of him. "You alone have followed my teaching, no one else has," he said, when he conferred on Merira the rank of high priest.
Merira came in while the king was sitting on the floor and the poodle, Dang, with its paws on his shoulders, was licking his face and the princesses were laughing and shouting.
"Abby has kissed Dang! Doggie has made friends with the king."