Here Ephraim interrupted her to exclaim in fiery tones:
“We are going to the mines this very day. I and my comrades, and my grandfather with us, will put his guards to flight.”
“And he shall hear from my lips,” Nun added, “how faithfully Kasana loved him, and that his life will be too short to thank her for such a sacrifice.”
His voice failed him—but every trace of suffering had vanished from the countenance of the dying girl, and for a long time she gazed heavenward silently with a happy look. By degrees, however, her smooth brow contracted in an anxious frown, and she gasped in low tones:
“Well, all is well... only one thing... my body... unembalmed ... without the sacred amulets....”
But the old man answered:
“As soon as you have closed your eyes, I will give it, carefully wrapped, to the Phoenician captain now tarrying here, that he may deliver it to your father.”
Kasana tried to turn her head toward him to thank him with a loving glance, but she suddenly pressed both hands on her breast, crimson blood welled from her lips, her cheeks varied from livid white to fiery scarlet and, after a brief, painful convulsion, she sank back. Death laid his hand on the loving heart, and her features gained the expression of a child whose mother has forgiven its fault and clasped it to her heart ere it fell asleep.
The old man, weeping, closed the dead girl’s eyes. Ephraim, deeply moved, kissed the closed lids, and after a short silence Nun said:
“I do not like to enquire about our fate beyond the grave, which Moses himself does not know; but whoever has lived so that his or her memory is tenderly cherished in the souls of loved ones, has, I think, done the utmost possible to secure a future existence. We will remember this dead girl in our most sacred hours. Let us do for her corpse what we promised, and then set forth to show the man for whom Kasana sacrificed what she most valued that we do not love him less than this Egyptian woman.”