"There, you have caught me!" he laughed, good-naturedly, again. "Ah, Dio, priestess of the Great Mother, you are still living on your Mountain and refuse to come down to the earth to us poor men. And yet one day you will come down, will get your feet muddy and bruise them against the stones and be glad even of such sandals as these. One must have mercy, my friend. Be sober and fast by yourself, but eat with the glutton and drink with the drunkard. And as for the Great Spirit, I hope he will forgive me: my sandals won't hurt him!"
He went on speaking at great length of the secret wisdom of the chosen and the folly of the mob, of the greatness of King Akhnaton and of his loneliness—"he, too, does not come down to earth from the Mountain"—of their future triple alliance and of how he, Tuta, will help them both "to come down."
Dio listened and the same spell came over her—she could not awake or cry out.
"No, he is not stupid," she thought. "Or he is both stupid and clever, crude and subtle. Very strong—not he, though, but the one who is behind him. 'He is only a knife in the hand and the hand is strong.' He talks to me as to a child, and I expect he talks to the king in the same way; and perhaps he is right: we are children and he is grown up; we are 'not quite human' and he—quite. He is all for the world and all the world is for him. A man like that is certain to reign. You will be king over the mice, you cat! Akhnaton will disappear, Tutankhaton will remain. He will go through the ages in his Amon's sandals, trampling on the Great Spirit. And the kingdom of this world will be Tuta's kingdom!"
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in," Tuta said.
The centurion of the palace guards came in and, kneeling down, handed Tuta a letter. He opened it and, after reading it, said:
"A chariot!"
When the centurion went out, he got up, walked across the room in silence, then sat down in his chair, and resting his head on his hand, heaved a deep sigh.
"Ah, the fools, the fools! I knew there was bound to be bloodshed...."