He paused and then added, with the childishly timid, apologetic smile that always wrung her heart: "The worst of it is that I sometimes make the most sacred things foolish and ridiculous: like a thief stealing and desecrating that which is holy...."
"Why do you talk like this?" Dio cried, indignantly.
"There, forgive me, I won't.... What is it I was going to say? Oh, yes, about Issachar. It wasn't out of foolishness I pardoned him. He is a very good man...."
The queen came in and the conversation dropped. Dio was glad: her heart was throbbing as though Issachar's knife had once more been thrust into the wound.
By the month of Paonzu, March-April, she was almost well though still weak.
The first time she went into the garden she was surprised to see that the hot summer came straight after the winter: there was no trace of spring.
Strange longing came upon her during those hot days of delusive southern spring. "He who drinks water out of the Nile forgets his native land," the Egyptians said. She fancied she, too, had forgotten it. What was this longing then? "It's nothing," she tried to comfort herself, "it's simply foolishness, the result of illness, as with the king. It will pass off." But it did not.
In the gardens of Maru-Aton by the big pond opposite the women's quarters where Dio lived, a rare tree, hardly ever seen in Egypt, was planted—a silver birch, graceful and slender, like a girl of thirteen. It had been brought as a present to Princess Makitatona from Thracia, the land of Midnight. The princess was very fond of it; she looked after it herself, watered it and kept the ground around it well dug, covering it with fresh Nile black earth.
Dio, too, grew fond of the birch tree. Every day she watched its buds swell and sticky, greenish yellow leaves, crumpled like the face of a new-born baby, open out; she kissed them and, sniffing them with her eyes closed, fancied that every moment she would hear the call of the cuckoo and smell the melting snow and lilies of the valley as in her native woods at home on Mount Ida—smell the real spring of her own native land.
When flocks of cranes flew northwards, with their melancholy call, she stretched out her arms to them: would that she, too, were flying with them! Looking at the ever blue, lifeless sky she longed for the living clouds she knew so well. Putting her ear to a shell, she eagerly listened to its roar, that was like the roar of sea waves; she dreamt of the sea in her sleep and wept. One day she sniffed a new sponge Zenra had just bought and almost cried in reality.