She fought with all her might against this attack and seizure, screamed aloud with fury, and woke at the sound of her own voice. Then she got up, dried her eyes that were wet with tears, and, after laying a freshly wetted cloth on the child’s throat, she went out of doors in obedience to the physician’s advice.
The sun was already at the meridian, and its direct rays were fiercely reflected from the slabs of yellow sandstone that paved the forecourt. On one side only of the wide, unroofed space, one of the colonnades that surrounded it threw a narrow shade, hardly a span wide; and she would not go there, for under it stood several beds on which lay pilgrims who, here in the very dwelling of the divinity, hoped to be visited with dreams which might give them an insight into futurity.
Klea’s head was uncovered, and, fearing the heat of noon, she was about to return into the door-keeper’s house, when she saw a young white-robed scribe, employed in the special service of Asclepiodorus, who came across the court beckoning eagerly to her. She went towards him, but before he had reached her he shouted out an enquiry whether her sister Irene was in the gate-keeper’s lodge; the high-priest desired to speak with her, and she was nowhere to be found. Klea told him that a grand lady from the queen’s court had already enquired for her, and that the last time she had seen her had been before daybreak, when she was going to fill the jars for the altar of the god at the Well of the Sun.
“The water for the first libation,” answered the priest, “was placed on the altar at the right time, but Doris and her sister had to fetch it for the second and third. Asclepiodorus is angry—not with you, for he knows from Imhotep that you are taking care of a sick child—but with Irene. Try and think where she can be. Something serious must have occurred that the high-priest wishes to communicate to her.”
Klea was startled, for she remembered Irene’s tears the evening before, and her cry of longing for happiness and freedom. Could it be that the thoughtless child had yielded to this longing, and escaped without her knowledge, though only for a few hours, to see the city and the gay life there?
She collected herself so as not to betray her anxiety to the messenger, and said with downcast eyes:
“I will go and look for her.”
She hurried back into the house, once more looked to the sick child, called his mother and showed her how to prepare the compresses, urging her to follow Imhotep’s directions carefully and exactly till she should return; she pressed one loving kiss on little Philo’s forehead—feeling as she did so that he was less hot than he had been in the morning—and then she left, going first to her own dwelling.
There everything stood or lay exactly as she had left it during the night, only the golden jars were wanting. This increased Klea’s alarm, but the thought that Irene should have taken the precious vessels with her, in order to sell them and to live on the proceeds, never once entered her mind, for her sister, she knew, though heedless and easily persuaded, was incapable of any base action.
Where was she to seek the lost girl? Serapion, the recluse, to whom she first addressed herself, knew nothing of her.