She looked at me with an expression of deepest gratitude, and her eyes brightened with bluish lights.
She took her foot, which this time submitted, and, like a woman about to put on her brodekin, she adjusted it to her leg with great dexterity.
This operation finished, she took a few steps about the room, as though to assure herself that she was in reality no longer lame.
“Ah, how happy my father will be, he who was so wretched because of my mutilation—he who, from the day of my birth, set a whole nation to work to hollow out a tomb so deep that he might preserve me intact until that supreme last day, when souls must be weighed in the scales of Amenti! Come with me to my father; he will be happy to receive you, for you have given me back my foot.”
I found this proposition quite natural. I decked myself out in a dressing-gown of huge sprawling design, which gave me an extremely Pharaohesque appearance; I hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers, and told the Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.
Before setting out, Hermonthis detached from her necklace the little green paste image and placed it on the scattered papers which strewed the table.
“It is no more than right,” she said smilingly, “that I should replace your paper weight.”
She gave me her hand, which was soft and cool as the skin of a serpent, and we departed.
For a time we sped with the rapidity of an arrow, through a misty expanse of space, in which almost indistinguishable silhouettes flashed by us, on the right and left.
For an instant we saw nothing but sea and sky.