As soon as the ladies, who accompanied them, had turned their backs,
Bent-Anat grasped her brother's hand with unaccustomed warmth, and said:
"Avoid all imprudence; but your demand is just, and I will help you with all my heart."
CHAPTER XI.
As soon as Bent-Anat had quitted Mena's domain, the dwarf Nemu entered the garden with a letter, and briefly related his adventures; but in such a comical fashion that both the ladies laughed, and Katuti, with a lively gaiety, which was usually foreign to her, while she warned him, at the same time praised his acuteness. She looked at the seal of the letter and said:
"This is a lucky day; it has brought us great things, and the promise of greater things in the future." Nefert came close up to her and said imploringly: "Open the letter, and see if there is nothing in it from him."
Katuti unfastened the wax, looked through the letter with a hasty glance, stroked the cheek of her child, and said:
"Perhaps your brother has written for him; I see no line in his handwriting."
Nefert on her side glanced at the letter, but not to read it, only to seek some trace of the well-known handwriting of her husband.
Like all the Egyptian women of good family she could read, and during the first two years of her married life she had often—very often—had the opportunity of puzzling, and yet rejoicing, over the feeble signs which the iron hand of the charioteer had scrawled on the papyrus for her whose slender fingers could guide the reed pen with firmness and decision.
She examined the letter, and at last said, with tears in her eyes: